Georgia will go a third year without assigning A-to-F grades to public schools and districts because of the COVID-19 pandemic, after the federal government waived part of the requirements for the state’s normal evaluation system.
Instead, the state will publish multiple measures that are normally parts of the overall grade, saying it can’t reliably compute some figures because there was no testing in 2020 and widely varying shares of students from school to school took tests in 2021.
Normally, schools and districts are graded on a single 100-point scale in what Georgia calls the College and Career Ready Performance Index, with a letter grade assigned based on the score. Georgia didn’t administer its Milestones standardized tests to students in grades 3-8 and high school in spring of 2020 and produced no grades after that year. The state didn’t assign grades based on the 2021 tests either, meaning schools last received new grades in 2019.
