Dive Brief:

• The Arkansas Board of Education voted Thursday to replace its numerical rating system for schools with letter grades.  
• Instead of being rated on a 1-5 scale, schools will receive letter grades — a move that the board hopes will make it easier for families to understand how a school is doing.  
• The grades will be based on test scores from last spring's Benchmark and End-of-Course state exams.  

Dive Insight:

The point of school ratings is for transparency and for parents to know how their kids' schools are doing. Changing to letter grades makes sense if it makes that simpler. The next step would be for Arkansas to assess its schools on qualitative factors beyond just test scores. New York City schools, for example, recently moved in that direction when Chancellor Carmen Farina announced that schools will be subject to overarching assessments that deal with both test scores and surveys on school culture. Similar to NYC, Arkansas schools will not be penalized or rewarded based on the scores.