Every school day, students are graded on their performance, but how should the schools themselves be graded on their ability to educate those students?
After decades of changes to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce's school report cards, policymakers, school officials and researchers have yet to reach mutual agreement on that issue.
The release of the latest 2025-26 report cards, which scores districts on a 5-star scale, is expected next week. Some experts say the revamped ratings, namely the college, career or military service readiness component introduced last year, better illustrate student growth, particularly in urban districts.
Others, namely Cincinnati Public Schools and Ohio Education Association officials, are expecting what
they describe as flawed ratings that merely prove that academic success is correlated with an area's average household income.
And as districts like CPS forge ahead with tax levies, appealing to voters on the November general election ballot, the pressure around receiving high ratings is doubly intense this year, union officials say.
Regardless, according to the state education department, the purpose of the report cards has always been crystal clear.
"Public education is a public investment. The report cards provide public accountability," the department's Deputy Chief of Communications Chad Eberly said in an email to The Enquirer.
Districts used to get A-F letter grade before political shift
Prior to the five-star scale adopted in 2021, the state had been using an A-F grading scale since 2012, with a C grade signifying that a district was making average progress. An A grade meant a district was making excellent progress, while the lowest mark, an F, meant a district was failing to meet minimum progress.
The backlash against the grading scale, particularly among urban districts that consistently earned average C grades or lower, was swift.
School officials argued that the C grade carried too negative an impression for families despite signifying that a district was meeting average standards, Vice President of the Ohio Education Association Dan Greenberg told The Enquirer.
"What we were looking at when we saw A to F was that folks associated that with the same things that they got grades for in school," CPS board president Brandon Craig said. "The thought process is that if you worked really hard, you could always get an A ... (but) there are actual components that prevent (districts) from getting an A."
What Greenberg described as an oversimplification of the complex reality of educating students, others argue that the A-F ratings were crucially universal, allowing parents to easily differentiate the quality of different schools.
"This is the way we grade our students, and it makes just as much sense in an educational system," Chad Aldis, vice president for Ohio policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, told The Enquirer.
Aldis, a school choice advocate who testified before the state legislature in support of the A-F grade scale, said the letter grades "lost political support" in 2019 as there was a cognitive dissonance in what C means in popular culture.
The letter grades were tossed aside in favor of the five-star scale in a sweeping set of reforms signed into law in 2021.
Progress, gap closing scores meant to serve urban districts, marginalized students
Factored into the overall ratings are six components, which have been more or less the same since 2012: gap closing, achievement, progress, graduation, early literacy and college, career, workforce and military readiness.
Previously called "prepared for success," which looked at career or college readiness, the newly named college, career, workforce and military readiness measure was tracked in 2024 and first included in the report cards released in 2025.
Greenberg said the readiness measure is the only component not strongly correlated with poverty.
Even the components designed to account for wealth disparities in schools – progress and gap closing – are positively correlated with income levels, Greenberg said. Intended to showcase the improvements made in low-income districts, gap closing tracks academic achievement by a range of subgroups, including students with disabilities, English learners and economically disadvantaged students.
The progress component tracks students' academic growth using their prior results on Ohio's state tests. Achievement ratings, in contrast, look solely at whether students tested below, above or in line with state standards in a given year.
Rather than measuring achievement alone, Eberly said, ratings are broken down in this way because the state "recognizes that factors outside of schools can affect student outcomes."
Thus, those who support the report cards maintain that the progress and gap closing measures do what they're supposed to: give urban districts that serve high rates of marginalized students the chance to spotlight academic wins.
"We know what the data says about achievement or opportunity gaps that those students face," Aldis said. "But high-poverty schools score well in (progress) all the time."
In the five-star scale used today, 3 stars signifies the district is meeting state standards. Anything less means it needs support to meet state standards and anything greater means it's exceeded standards.
Of the 607 districts included in the dataset for the 2024-25 academic year, 57 districts failed to meet state standards in overall ratings – including all but one of Ohio's nine urban districts.
Only two of those same urban districts – Akron City and Cleveland Municipal – met state standards with 3 stars in the gap closing measure. In the progress measure, four of the nine urban districts scored 3 stars or above. The rest, including Cincinnati, fell below 3 stars in both components.
Only six districts in the region received five-star ratings overall and in the gap closing measure last year: Madeira City, Mariemont City, Wyoming City, Mason City, Wayne Local and Indian Hill. Union leaders noted those districts are all in relatively wealthy suburbs.
Should private schools have report cards, too?
Officials in urban districts say the report cards impose ambitious expectations given that they deal with vastly different issues than their counterparts in suburban and rural areas. And they question why nonpublic schools that accept public dollars through vouchers don't receive state report cards.
The issue of a district's size alone can greatly interfere with earning good ratings, CPS board president Craig said.
As a large urban district with over 34,000 students, Craig said, realistically they're never going to achieve a 100% graduation or attendance rate.
"There are students who leave and we don't know where they've gone to," he said. "And until we are able to report that they're somewhere else, then they count against us."
Aldis, in contrast, said it'd be a disservice to CPS students and other urban districts to grade them on alternative standards rather than part of the statewide report cards.
"CPS graduates are going to be going out and trying to find jobs and going to colleges with students from all these other districts," Aldis said. "And CPS parents deserve an honest appraisal of where their kids are."
As an advocate for a parent's right to easily accessible information about all kinds of schools, Aldis said he supports more streamlined reports about nonpublic schools. But he said he thinks report cards for private schools in the same five-star format aren't coming anytime soon.
Urban district officials carry a different sentiment.
"I think every school that receives state funds should be held to the same level of accountability," Craig said in a text message. "It would ... remove private schools' ability to depend upon reputation alone to show results."
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Ohio school ratings spark debate over fairness, accountability
