The Texas Education Agency is expected to release A-F accountability letter grades for schools and districts for the first time since 2019, after pauses and partial releases due to the pandemic and a lawsuit that halted their release last year.
Advocates and analysts are cheering the planned Aug. 15 release, telling the San Antonio Report that valuable insights related to how districts and schools are performing are long overdue for parents, policymakers and taxpayers.
The simple grades provide an entry point for parents to see how schools are doing on a wide range of issues, including student achievement and growth, how successfully they prepare students for college or the workforce, and how they are working towards closing achievement gaps for traditionally underserved demographics, which is referred to as “closing the gaps.”
However, district leaders, who have cast doubt on changes to both the test at the heart of the grading system and the methodology for the system, are urging caution over giving too much weight to the letter grades as the release date approaches.
Declines in scores on this year’s State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) test will contribute to lower grades in student growth and school achievement, two key domains that are ranked alongside closing the gaps – to determine a school and district letter grade.
The better of School Progress and Student Achievement makes up 70% of the score, while Closing the Gaps makes up the remaining 30%.
District concerns linger
Changes to the key indicators that determine those domains shifted last year as part of a state-level overhaul to increase rigor and align statewide standards. The rollout of the changes angered districts, catching many off guard and leading to a lawsuit that halted their release.
The Southwest Independent School District joined the lawsuit in October, and officials remain perturbed about the methodology.
Jenny Collier, a spokesperson for Southwest ISD, said the concerns raised in the lawsuit “remain unresolved … making the release of the 2024 scores a significant concern.”
“They will be difficult to interpret because the 2023 scores still haven’t been released and, given the substantial changes in the scoring system, it is not practical to compare the 2024 scores to those from 2022,” she said. “Therefore, we must treat the 2024 scores as a new baseline and work to move forward from there.”
Kate Greer, the managing director of policy for the Dallas-based education nonprofit Commit Partnership, told the Report that it is the delay from the lawsuit that would make it difficult to compare the letter grades to past releases.
“The lack of scores last year due to the lawsuit has tied the hands of parents, policymakers and community members to really have a sense of how schools are improving year over year,” she said.
To account for that last year, TEA officials released “what-if” scores that used the old rating system as a bridge, with the new scores set to become the baseline. The TEA has not publicly shared whether new what-if scores will be calculated this year.
But while the debates over the scores have played out in board meetings, courtrooms and the statehouse, millions of students continue matriculating through the public school system.
“Students who were in third grade the last time that … full scores were issued are now entering their ninth grade year or their freshman year of high school,” Greer said. “The lack of ratings is not in the best interest of students or school leaders or policymakers across the state because it removes a critical component to… informing parents how schools are doing.”
Local systems continued
The Alamo Heights Independent School District’s Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction, Jimmie Walker, said that the district’s community-based accountability system continued to inform parents about the quality and efficacy of their child’s school in the absence of the state scores. Internal metrics also helped inform instructional gaps.
“I think what’s great about community based accountability is even though we have not had A-F in a year, the world has continued to turn,” she said. “Teachers welcome kids, instruction goes on like it didn’t stop or even slow down anything that we do.”
State standardized test data was also parsed by nonprofit groups, including Houston-based Children at Risk, which gave its own A-F scores.
Walker says Alamo Heights parents didn’t miss the state accountability tool.
“If that was essential data to families and teachers and school systems, how would we have moved on?” Walker said. “And the fact is, everybody did. So I think that helps put it into perspective.”
Voucher fight on the horizon
The release of the letter grades next month will come just days after the House Education Committee meets to discuss Education Savings Accounts, a politically controversial issue that has divided the state legislature and the Republican party in recent years.
District leaders, including those involved in the lawsuit, have connected the shifting goalposts of accountability to the simmering fight over voucher-like programs.
During an August board meeting, former Seguin ISD Superintendent Matthew Gutierrez called the changes an “injustice to our schools.”
“It is not fair to change the rules of the game after the game has been played,” he said. “It is an effort to say and show that our public schools are failing and to push vouchers.”
As the most forward-facing representations of how a school district is doing, along with raw standardized test scores, accountability grades have been used as a blunt object in that debate, which dominated last year’s session and a subsequent special session.
Greer, of Commit Partnership, pushed back on that idea, which has been echoed by other voucher opponents, saying that the accountability system precedes the voucher debate and is needed to ensure taxpayer-funded schools are doing what they are supposed to while giving local leaders a roadmap to do better.
“A-F, when used well, is a continuous improvement tool,” she said. “So it’s an opportunity for superintendents, for boards of trustees, to use this as a performance management metric, and to understand where low performing schools need more help to intervene on those campuses to improve outcomes for students.”
As parents see the scores next month, Greer hopes they look into the numbers behind the letter.
“I would encourage parents to look closely at how many students on those campuses are meeting grade level expectations,” she said. “Because at the end of the day, this is a tool, but it’s holding adults accountable for how well they’re educating Texas students across the state.”
