In grade school, students are assessed on a scale from A to F. Now, so are their schools. With the click of a button, Alabama parents can log on to the Alabama Accountability System’s website to examine how their child’s school is performing.
Districts, and all schools within that district, will be assigned a letter grade on the standard A to F scale based on several factors that differ at each level. Holistically, the state of Alabama is performing well in graduation rates and learning gains, but has a lower score in the student achievement category.
On the report cards, users can see how a given district is performing in comparison to the state as a whole. However, parents cannot see the grades quite yet. As of this moment, Phase I of the project is complete, but Phase II, which includes more in-depth analysis and the letter grades, will not be completed until December 2017.
The program was created by the Alabama Department of Education to hold districts more accountable. As such, the program only assess the state’s public schools. But many of Alabama’s public schools are not doing well at all. In fact, 76 of them have been defined as “failing” by the State Department of Education.
School choice in Alabama is not expansive, and policy institutes such as Milton Friedman’s EdChoice have a difficult time making cross-state comparisons due to the lack of available state-level data. Using only the data available from private and traditional public schools, Alabama was ranked thirteenth by EdChoice given its two available school choice programs.
Alabama recently passed legislation to make charter schools a reality. With the passage of Act 2015-3, the Alabama State Department of Education, Public Charter Schools, was established. Since that time, the state DOE has received four authorizer applications (Madison City, Bessemer City, Birmingham City, and Athens City) from local boards of education indicating their intent to become a registered public charter school authorizer.
According to a report from Al.com, only Birmingham City and Athens City are fully registered at this time.
