Impact Components

Overview

An Impact is TKG Analytics's representation of a single accountability result for a district, school, or teacher. TKG Analytics rebuilds the Mississippi accountability model component for component, so each impact breaks down into the same measures the state adds together to produce a rating.

Every component is stored as a numerator and denominator (the students who hit the bar over the students who counted) and contributes points toward the district, school, or teacher's scale score. The scale score is the sum of the component points, and it maps to the A through F letter grade. Because the scale score is summed from the components at run time, changing the underlying scores updates the components and the rating together.

How the Model Is Weighted

Mississippi uses two point structures, and the components and their weights differ between them. The weights below include English Language Progress (ELP), which applies only to schools and districts that meet the EL minimum (see English Language Progress below).

Elementary and middle schools (700 points), with English Language Progress:

High schools and districts (1,000 points), with English Language Progress:

When a school or district does not meet the EL minimum, English Language Progress is not calculated. Its 5% share is absorbed back into the other components, so each one lands on its full, round value while the totals stay at 700 and 1,000.

Elementary and middle schools (700 points), without English Language Progress:

High schools and districts (1,000 points), without English Language Progress:

The scale score maps to a letter grade against the state's cut points:

Cut Scores

A cut score is the scale-score line a result has to clear. TKG Analytics works from the cut scores Mississippi publishes in the accountability standards and derives every level from them. For district-defined custom cut scores (benchmark ranges), see Custom Cut Scores and Benchmark Ranges.

State cut scores are the published A, B, C, and D scale-score thresholds for each model. TKG Analytics uses the published values directly, and they are year-aware: the thresholds changed beginning with 2026, so older years use the prior thresholds. The values in the table above are the 2026 standards.

District and school cut scores come straight from those published standards:

• District ratings use the published district thresholds.
• School ratings use the published school thresholds.
• Whether the 700-point or 1,000-point set applies depends on whether the district, school, or teacher is scored on the elementary and middle model or the high school model.

Teacher cut scores are derived, because teachers have no separately published standard:

• If the teacher teaches high school students that year, the 1,000-point school thresholds are used; otherwise the 700-point school thresholds are used.
• Those thresholds are then standardized to the teacher's own point total. When a teacher's impact is scored on a different point base than the published standard, each threshold is rescaled in proportion so the A, B, C, and D lines land correctly for that teacher's total.

You can review the derived teacher cut scores in the Teacher Cut Scores view.

Proficiency

Proficiency measures how many students met expectations on the assessment, out of the students who counted toward that district, school, or teacher.

• For grades 3-8 and the high school End-of-Course exams, a student must score Proficiency Level 4 or Level 5 to land in the proficiency numerator.
• For MAAP-A (the alternate assessment), Proficiency Level 3 is proficient.

Proficiency is measured in ELA, Math, and Science. Science proficiency comes from the grade 5 and grade 8 science assessments and the Biology end-of-course exam (science contributes proficiency only, not growth).

Growth

Growth asks whether a student improved as expected from one year to the next, using the state's standards-based growth model. Each subject is measured two ways:

• Growth (all students): growth across every student with a current and prior score.
• Growth (lowest 25%): the same calculation scoped to the lowest-performing 25% of students.

How that lowest-25% group is chosen, and what to do when it holds more than a quarter of your students, is covered in The Lowest 25% Group below.

Because growth compares two years, a student needs both a prior and a current score to contribute. ELA and Math carry growth; Science does not.

The Lowest 25% Group

The lowest-25% group is chosen inside the group being measured, using students' prior-year scores. A district's SPED impact ranks its SPED students against one another, its EL impact ranks its EL students, and the all-students impact ranks everyone, so each one reports the bottom quartile of its own population rather than the district-wide bottom quartile narrowed down afterward.

Within a group, each grade is ranked separately, and a grade with fewer than four students to rank contributes no one at the first step.

Those grades are cohorts formed from students' prior-year scores, not from the grade a student sits in today, so a grade's row can include students who were retained or who skipped a grade. See Grade Skippers and Retained Students.

On a 3rd Grade impact the row is named Retained third graders, because only a student repeating 3rd grade has a 3rd grade prior score to be ranked on. On a teacher's impact it can appear twice, once for feeder students and once for everyone else. On a teacher's Compacted impact, grade 8 is split again: students whose prior is their Math 8 score from the same assessment, rather than a prior-year score, are ranked in their own row, Grade 8 (Math 8 prior). See Compacted Scores.

MAAP-A students are ranked as one cohort of their own rather than spread across the grades, taking the bottom quartile only, with no expansion steps and no four-student minimum. See The MAAP-A Cohort.

The three steps

The group has a minimum size floor of 10 students, counted across the grade cohorts only - MAAP-A students are not counted toward it. If the first step does not reach the floor, the group widens, one step at a time, until it does. Every impact lands on exactly one of these, and the Lowest 25% Group view names the one it landed on:

1. Bottom quartile - the lowest-scoring quarter of each grade. Most impacts stop here.
2. Expanded to students below Advanced - every student whose prior-year result was below Advanced.
3. Expanded to all students in the group - everyone, when even step 2 does not reach 10.

An impact can reach step 3 and still hold fewer than 10 students. That is not an error; it means the group is genuinely that small.

Small groups reach steps 2 and 3 often. A single school's SPED or EL cohort frequently ends up with most or all of its students counted as its own "lowest 25%". The same holds for split schools, where the non-EOC and EOC parts each get their own lowest-25% group, which is why a small EOC cohort's "lowest 25%" can end up being most or all of that cohort.

Why a grade can come in above 25%

Students with the same prior-year score are counted together, so a grade of 59 students can contribute 18 rather than 15. The cut is made at a score, not at a headcount, and everyone sitting on that score is included.

Teachers

Teacher impacts do not use the steps. A teacher's lowest-25% group is always the bottom quartile of that teacher's own students, with no minimum size floor and no expansion.

Where to see it

Open an impact and choose Lowest 25% Group beside Impact Data and Impact Fraction. For ELA and for Math it shows:

• how many students were counted, out of how many were ranked
• all three steps, with the one this impact landed on marked
• a grade-by-grade table of how many students were ranked and how many were counted, with a total
• a note when a grade held too few students to rank
• a warning when the group holds fewer than 10 students even after step 3

The step, and the size of the largest row in the grade-by-grade table, are also columns on the impacts CSV export, so a whole list of impacts can be read at once. Where a teacher's grade is split into feeder or Math 8 prior rows, that size is the largest single row, not the whole grade.

Impacts generated before this was added show no Lowest 25% Group view. It fills in the next time that impact is generated. Impacts belonging to an inactive teacher or an inactive school are not regenerated, so those keep their existing figures and no Lowest 25% Group view until something rebuilds them.

Spring 2026 ELA adjustment

For Spring 2026 only, districts and schools are assigned the higher of their Spring 2026 or Spring 2025 result for three ELA components:

• ELA proficiency
• ELA growth of all students
• ELA growth of the lowest 25%

MDE field tested the writing portion of the Spring 2026 ELA assessment and left it out of the results returned to districts, so the operational form carried no writing. The adjustment offsets that.

Each of the three is compared on its own, so a rating can combine a 2025 value for one component with a 2026 value for another. Math, Science, Graduation, the Readiness Index, and English Language Progress are untouched.

Where it applies. District and school ratings for the year, at the final (quarter 99) impact. It does not apply to teacher impacts, to benchmark impacts, or to the subgroup score types.

Non-traditional high schools are not included yet. A school spanning below grade 9 through grade 12 is rated on its non-EOC and EOC results combined, and the adjustment is not applied to that combined rating. Those schools show their Spring 2026 ELA values alone, and the impact says so.

What you will see. On an affected impact the ELA column splits in two, Spring 2025 beside Spring 2026. The value that counted is shaded and the other is grayed, and the ELA total below them reflects whichever value counted for each component. The same two columns appear on the PDF.

When the comparison cannot be made. The prior year has to come from the official MDE results on file for that district or school, not from a recalculation. Without those results there is nothing to compare against, so the rating uses Spring 2026 alone and the impact says so. A school that opened after Spring 2025 usually falls in this group, unless its district is still working through onboarding, in which case no adjustment is applied yet and the impact shows nothing.

Once MDE publishes. When the official Spring 2026 results for a district or school are loaded, that published rating replaces the projection entirely, and the two ELA columns stop being shown. MDE's own figures already reflect the adjustment, so there is nothing left to compare.

Graduation Rate

For high schools and districts, the 4-year cohort graduation rate measures the share of a cohort that graduated on time. It is the single largest component in the 1,000-point model.

Fed by the graduation cohort data your district provides.

Readiness Index

The Readiness Index (formerly College and Career Readiness) applies to high schools and districts and is made up of three equally weighted pieces:

• Acceleration: participation and performance in qualifying acceleration coursework (Advanced Placement, Dual Credit / Dual Enrollment, and Industry Certification). See Acceleration Metrics.
• Achievement: readiness achievement against the Readiness Standard for that district, school, or teacher.
• Assessment: readiness assessment participation and results.

English Language Progress

English Language Progress (ELP) measures whether English learner students are progressing toward English proficiency, using the ELPT (ELPA21) Overall score.

• A school or district needs a minimum of 10 EL students who met Full Academic Year and have both a current and prior year ELPT score.
• First-year EL students are exempt.
• Each student scores between 0 and 1: a student who regresses scores 0, and a student progressing as expected or better scores 1.
• ELP is worth 5% of the total available points (35 on a 700-point school, 50 on a 1,000-point school). When ELP is included, the other components are reduced by a total of 5% to make room for it.

See EL Subgroups for how EL students are grouped.

Third Grade Reading

Third grade reading is governed by the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, which tracks third graders against the state reading promotion cut. It is a promotion gate tracked alongside the model rather than a scale-score component.

Fed by the third grade reading data your district uploads. See Third Grade Pass Rate Upload.

A Note on U.S. History

U.S. History was a proficiency measure in earlier years of the model. As of Spring 2026, U.S. History is no longer a component of the accountability model and does not contribute to the rating. TKG Analytics still stores U.S. History proficiency for reporting, and it may appear in historical data for prior years, but it is not part of the scale score going forward.

Where It Lives

• The Impact Data tile on a district, school, or teacher page opens the impact view, where the components and scale score are laid out together.
• The view can be read per score type (for example MAAP, K-2, Inclusion, Gifted, Feeder).
• CSV and PDF exports are available.

Common Questions

• Why is a growth component lower than I expect? Growth needs a current and a prior score for each student. Students missing a prior year do not contribute.
• Why doesn't my school have a graduation or Readiness Index component? Those apply to the 1,000-point high school and district model. A 700-point elementary or middle school does not carry them.
• Why is there no EL component for my school? ELP only calculates once the school or district has at least 10 qualifying EL students. Below that minimum, no EL measure is produced.
• Where did U.S. History go? It is no longer a scoring component as of Spring 2026. See the note above.
• How does the scale score become a letter grade? The component points are summed into the scale score, which maps to the A through F cut points above.

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