The Tennessee Department of Education presented a plan to the State Board of Education on Aug. 27, 2026, to merge its federal Every Student Succeeds Act accountability system with the state's A-F letter grade system into a single framework. Dr. David Laird, the department's assistant commissioner for assessment, accountability and research, told the board that the goal is to have the new system finalized before the start of the 2027-28 school year, following a year-long process of stakeholder feedback and recommendations from school directors.
The two systems currently use different indicators and weights. The federal ESSA system emphasizes academic growth, with growth making up 35 percent of the score for K-8 schools and 25 percent for high schools. It also includes indicators absent from the state letter grade system: graduation rate (5 percent of the high school score), chronic absenteeism (10 percent), English language proficiency (10 percent), and student subgroup performance, which is weighted at 40 percent across all federal indicators. The state letter grade system, by contrast, weights proficiency at 50 percent for both K-8 and high schools and includes none of those four indicators, as documented by SCORE and EdTrust-Tennessee.
Comparative Precedent
Tennessee originally used a single accountability system aligned to ESSA when it developed its plan in 2017. At that time, the state's A-F grades and federal school designations came from the same calculation. In 2023, under Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds, the department decoupled the systems by introducing a new letter grade methodology that emphasized proficiency over growth, creating the dual-system situation the state now seeks to resolve, as reported by Chalkbeat.
This is not the first time Tennessee has dealt with conflicting accountability lists. In 2018, testing problems led state lawmakers to bar the use of TNReady scores for the state's priority school list, while federal law still required them. The result was three separate lists of struggling schools: a state priority list, a federal Comprehensive Support and Improvement list of about 85 schools, and a federal Additional Targeted Support and Improvement list. The lists overlapped but were not identical, illustrating the confusion that dual systems can produce, according to Chalkbeat.
Research Evidence
SCORE's 2026 State of Education report recommends that a unified system retain federal subgroup reporting, balance growth and achievement weights, and increase the weight of the College and Career Readiness indicator. The organization argues that the CCR indicator, which tracks successful completion, is a stronger measure of readiness than the federal Ready Graduate metric, which tracks program participation.
EdTrust-Tennessee argues that the current state system puts less emphasis on student growth and does not account for the performance of specific student subgroups, such as economically disadvantaged students, students with disabilities, English learners, and Black, Hispanic, and Native American students. The organization supports an equal balance of achievement and growth and the retention of subgroup data in any unified system, while acknowledging that the state system has provided greater transparency and includes the CCR indicator.
TDOE's position, as conveyed by Laird, is that if the overall performance a school achieves is not what the department would want for the majority of students, it would not be accurate to communicate to parents that the school is incredibly strong, even if growth measures suggest improvement. Laird's remarks indicate the department is weighing how proficiency and growth measures will be balanced in the unified system's communication to families.
Unverified and tracking
Advocacy groups including EdTrust-Tennessee have stated that the stakeholder engagement process for the unified system is less transparent than the 2023 letter grade development process, which included 10 town halls and a 47-member working group, and have urged broader public input from parents, students, and advocates. This claim is reported by two independent sources, Nashville Banner and EdTrust-Tennessee, but no official confirmation from TDOE has been provided.