Why Montgomery Public Schools received a record-low grade on the state report card

On Thursday afternoon, seven months after the 2022-23 school year concluded, the Alabama State Department of Education released its annual report cards documenting the performance of every K-12 public school in the state.

For the first time since the 2018-19 year, the report cards came with letter grades. However, districts and individual schools that would have received Ds or Fs have instead been labeled as “priority schools” — removing the “failing schools” language that state legislators got rid of in April.

Montgomery Public Schools earned the “priority school” grade of 67. This is the lowest score that the district has ever received since Alabama began releasing numerical grades in the 2016-17 school year, and the district has never earned a grade higher than a C.

“We acknowledge the current challenges reflected in our 2022-23 Alabama State Report Card data and the urgency in which we need to address it,” MPS Superintendent Melvin Brown said in a statement. “We anticipated our results and were not surprised by any of them. As referenced in our MPS State of the Schools address delivered in September, we have already begun to utilize our data to make stark and lasting changes to how we address this work.”

This year, out of 149 school districts in the system, 19% received As, 50% received Bs, 20% received Cs, 7% received Ds and 3% received Fs. There was one district with insufficient data.

Dozens of factors play into each district’s score, including English language arts proficiency, the chronic absenteeism rate and college and career readiness. Here is a breakdown of why MPS received the score it did.

Where MPS says it went wrong

In Superintendent Brown’s statement on the score, he pointed to two problem areas that he says were responsible for bringing the grade down from a C in 2021-22 to a D in 2022-23. Those were the graduation rate and the college and career readiness score.

The graduation rate, determined by how many high school students earned their degrees within four years, dropped from 84.5% to 67.47%.

The readiness score, determined by how many high school students met at least one CCR indicator, fell from 51.6% to 43.5%. The CCR indicators are meeting an ACT Subtest Benchmark, reaching the ACT WorkKeys Silver Level or higher, passing an Advanced Placement exam, earning an approved college credit, earning an approved industry credit and enlisting in the U.S. Armed Forces.

“For these two areas, the data reported in the 2022-2023 Report Card is actually from the school year 2021-2022, as it is reported a year in arrears,” Brown said. “MPS has already improved those two indicators, which will appear on next year's report card.”

He said the graduation rate reported on next year’s report card will show a 12% increase to 79.39%, and the CCR score will show a 16% bump to 59.47%.

“Those factors alone demonstrate our overall improvement,” Brown said. “Effective retention of learning occurs when students can apply their classroom knowledge in real-life context, resulting in improved test scores. We acknowledge that this will not take place overnight and that we will continue to face challenges; however, steady, incremental improvement is an absolute expectation.”

The good news

Beyond all of the areas where Montgomery Public Schools’s performance is lacking, there are a few bright spots.

The district has consistently received an A score in academic growth, meaning a high number of individual students are demonstrating improvements in English, reading and math on standardized assessments.

Another win for the district is that one of its magnets made the short list of Alabama schools to earn a perfect score of 100. That was Loveless Academic Magnet Program High School.

For more details on individual school grades, see the Montgomery Advertiser’s list of the best and worst performing schools in the district.

Stagnant academic achievement

Multiple factors in the MPS score did not change from last year to this year.

For example, the academic achievement rate stayed at 43%. This rate reflects the results for all standardized tests taken at various grade levels — including everything from third grade reading tests to 11th grade ACT scores.

Scores don’t show actual proficiency rates, but instead, a factor of overall performance.

Another component that didn’t change much for MPS was the chronic absenteeism rate, the percent of students K-12 who miss 18 or more days of school during the year, excused or not.

Last year saw 25.8% of students chronically absent, and this year’s rate is a slightly higher 26.3%. Both scores mean that more than a quarter of MPS students are more likely than their non-chronically absent counterparts to fall behind, disengage from school and eventually drop out.

Brown said in his 2023 State of the Schools address that lowering the MPS absenteeism rate is one of his top priorities.

Low English, math and science proficiency

While the report card for the 2021-22 school year does not include district-level proficiency scores, this year’s report card does.

They don’t look great for Montgomery.

The category MPS students scored highest in was English and language arts, which has a 32% proficiency rate. Science scores were even lower with a 25% proficiency rate, and math scores were the lowest with just 13.5% proficient students.

“We have high expectations for ourselves, our district, and, most importantly, our students. We also insist that they have high expectations for themselves,” Brown said in a statement. “Our strategic plan will soon be completed with specific metrics, milestones, and benchmarks that will allow us and our community to gauge our progress. We also intend to initiate a school and community-wide literacy campaign to demonstrate the importance of everyone playing a role in our students' achievement. We aim to ensure that all students meet their academic growth, attain and exceed proficiency, and are college and career-ready."

Hadley Hitson covers children's health, education and welfare for the Montgomery Advertiser. She can be reached at hhitson@gannett.com. To support her work, subscribe to the Advertiser.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: MPS leader says district will grow from poor state report card grade