Changes to Georgia school accountability could mean no more A-to-F grades for schools and districts

A school bus sits outside the Peach County School District office in Fort Valley, Georgia. (Business Wire)

It’s getting more complicated to tell how Georgia public schools are faring.

The state Department of Education on Thursday released a full spectrum of school accountability numbers for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic. But there isn’t a single number to sum up the performance of any one school or district. And that could ultimately mean the end of Georgia’s A-to-F letter grade system for schools and districts.

Discarding that single number accomplished a long-held goal of state Superintendent Richard Woods, who says it’s unfair to measure schools on just one yardstick. Woods won approval from the U.S. Department of Education in October to stop calculating a single number in the College and Career Ready Performance Index.