Kansas Policy Institute updates A-F grades for Kansas schools

The Kansas Policy Institute has released its A through F grades for Kansas schools, based on 2017-18 test score data.

“We want to make it easy for people to understand what’s actually being achieved,” said Kansas Policy Institute President Dave Trabert. “That’s one of the biggest barriers to improving public education in Kansas, because many people have been, it’s not their fault, they’ve been given a false impression of relatively high achievement in Kansas.”

The grades use publicly available data from the Kansas Department of Education.

“There’s 1,268 school buildings on the Kansas Policy website, where you can see a letter grade,” said Trabert. “The building is even broken down so you can see how students in each grade perform.”

KPI has taken the four levels given by the Department of Education and turned them into letter grades.

“Level 4 is considered excellent understanding of the material and on track for college and career,” said Trabert. “We gave that an A. Level 3 is effective in understanding and on track, so we gave that a B. There’s four levels and five grades, so level 2 we split. Level 2, the definition is basic understanding of material, but needs remedial training. It’s considered at grade level, but still needs remedial training, so we gave the top half of scores in level 2 a C.”

The bottom half of scores in level 2 are a D and level 1 scores are an F on the KPI measurement. You can find the measurements here.