For the second year in a row, Idaho’s State Department of Education won’t be calculating “composite” scores for each school and using those scores to rank and identify the state’s lowest-performing schools as it has done in years past.
The state is typically required to conduct those rankings as part of a federal accountability system.
The U.S. Department of Education granted Idaho a waiver from calculating composite scores in both 2020 and 2021 in light of the coronavirus pandemic.
Idaho Eductaion News reports, the rankings require the State Department of Education to look at multiple years of assessment data and Idaho does not have standardized test data from the spring of 2020 when schools were closed during the pandemic. Even though schools have 2021 data, the state can’t calculate metrics like year-to-year growth because of the missing 2020 tests.
