Jackson Free Press

CLINTON, Miss. (AP) — A legislative watchdog committee is questioning how Mississippi grades its public school districts and individual schools.

The Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review Committee released a report Thursday sharply criticizing how the Mississippi Department of Education calculates A-to-F grades for schools.

The committee says the current system gives too big a boost to schools recording growth in student test scores, obscuring their actual achievement levels.

The report also criticizes the practice of sorting student test scores into broad classification categories and then using the shares of students in each category to assign grades. It says decisions on scores required to reach performance levels are arbitrary.

State superintendent Carey Wright says she fundamentally disagrees with the report's conclusions. She says some of PEER's suggested changes would make school grading less statistically reliable.