Letter grades for schools based on standardized test scores were released last month by the Houston-based nonprofit Children At Risk, showing that San Antonio schools lagged behind their counterparts in other regions of the state. Only one local school was among the top 20 in the state.
But that letter grade doesn’t necessarily reflect what is happening in your child’s classroom.
Children at Risk’s letter grades are among the only comprehensive windows into student academic performance statewide, since the Texas Education Agency’s A-F rating system remains in limbo after being challenged in courts by school districts over vast changes in the rating formulas. Both ratings use similar inputs, but the TEA doesn’t rank schools and the nonprofit analyzes the raw data differently to arrive at letter grades.
Without knowing what factors feed into the letter grades, or the circumstances on the ground, however, letter grades tell only part of the story. As a result, officials and advocates say the rankings should be the beginning of the conversation, not the end.
Beyond the scores, school officials, experts and one parent told the San Antonio Report that to figure out how your child’s school truly stacks up, you should talk to their teacher and principal and keep track of their work.
Many of the top schools in the latest Children at Risk ratings are on the North Side of San Antonio, such as Blattman Elementary School in the Northside Independent School District, which took the second-place spot for elementary schools, and Basis Shavano Campus, which took the top spot for middle schools. IDEA Carver College Preparatory on the East Side was the only high school campus in the region to receive an A rating, although others got A- ratings.
The lowest-ranked high schools on the list were in the Edgewood and South San Antonio ISDs, including Memorial, South San and JFK high schools. Lowell and Davis middle schools in San Antonio ISD were the lowest-rated middle schools, and Bexar County Academy, Jubilee Lake View University Prep and Storm Elementary in SAISD were the lowest-ranked elementary schools.
Full ratings are available at the Children At Risk website.
District leaders have celebrated and faced criticism for the scores in the days since they were released, but many have said the information is too old to have an impact. Others simply said they don’t let outside rankings influence decisions.
So what do the scores mean — and how should you use them?
Not the whole story
Bob Sanborn, the CEO of Children At Risk, said the nonprofit has been ranking and rating schools across Texas since 2006 to hold schools and politicians accountable and to give parents a tool to advocate on behalf of their children.
“We really want parents to have an idea of how good schools are, but more importantly, for them to become engaged in demanding more of our state Legislature,” he said. “In a world where a lot of people know that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, how can parents sort of become squeaky wheels?”
In the most recent report, data show students across the state, but particularly in San Antonio, are struggling to return to academic achievement and growth levels seen before the pandemic, Sanborn said.
“It’s clear that schools are still suffering, and children are still suffering from pandemic learning loss,” he added.
Jack Schneider, a University of Massachusetts Amherst professor and the executive director of the Beyond Test Scores Project, warned against using letter grades to rate the quality of schools.
“If you think about the many different things that we want from our schools and the fact that many of us prioritize different things at different times … it really doesn’t make sense to try to distill something as complex as school quality into a rating or a ranking,” he said.
That is why some districts, like Alamo Heights ISD, use community-based accountability systems, which go beyond the state grade to give families a more holistic view, based on the community’s stated values, of how their children’s school is doing.
Student learning and progress make up only one of the seven pillars in such systems. Others include student readiness, student well-being and safety, and fiscal and operational systems. As teachers and district administrators receive feedback from parents and identify issues, they direct resources to ensure those pillars are best supported.
Alamo Heights ISD’s assistant superintendent of curriculum, Jimmie Walker, said A-F scales lack the information community members want to have about their children, the information needed to effectively identify solutions to potential issues.
“When you try to simplify it into a B, understanding, ‘What do you do with that? … Is it a B because there’s not a lot of family engagement? Is it a B because of where your resources are going?” she said.
The community-based rating allows parents and district officials to narrow those causes to leverage solutions, Walker said, adding that solutions at the local level are more likely to work than those decreed from Austin.
Beyond the scoring, the district does three of its own independent assessments a year to gauge progress and identify weaknesses.
Sanborn agreed there are some drawbacks from the simplistic scale.
“We live in a time where people want a quick response. They don’t want to read a paragraph, they want the letter grade,” he said.
Parents and administrators, including Walker, also said scores based on State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness tests given last May have little bearing on the work that is being done today to improve scores, which have since been updated following district testing.
Parents as advocates
This year, schools in each region that serve high-poverty populations but scored high on the tests were given “Gold Ribbon” designations in the Children At Risk scores.
Northside ISD board President Bobby Blount said it is counterintuitive to rate groups differently based on the number of at-risk or socioeconomically disadvantaged students they have enrolled.
A similar designation of “bright spots” was given to San Antonio schools in a report put out by City Education Partners last year.
Dalia Flores Contreras, that organization’s CEO, said recognizing those schools’ burdens is just as important as highlighting their successes.
“If, as a community, we worked together on some of those systemic issues, folks wouldn’t have to work so hard or jump through hoops and more children would be able to say that that was their success story,” she said. “If we want to go from isolated cases to systemwide success, that’s what we need to do.”
Sanborn said that, while he has received pushback in the past, comparing demographically similar areas is a key method to uncovering effective schooling in spite of difficult circumstances.
According to experts and school officials, no rating system can make up for parents engaging with the school and monitoring their children’s progress.
One parent, Maira Carrier, found the school ratings to be divorced from her son’s situation last year, when he struggled throughout the year despite teachers saying he was doing well and Hoffman Elementary being rated a “B” by the Texas Education Agency.
Seeing the disconnect, she decided to take her son out and homeschool him to meet his needs. That experience, along with the potential changes to the A-F rating from the state, led Carrier to view all letter rankings, including those from Children at Risk, with more scrutiny.
“It really raises a lot of questions,” she said. “It makes me concerned to know that they’re presenting something and yet that might not be the reflection of what it really is.”
Good educational outcomes can also occur at poorly rated campuses, according to Sanborn.
“If you are at an F school, that doesn’t mean that everyone is doing F work,” he said. “So the letter grade does not allow for nuance. That is one of the weaknesses, but one of the strengths is that in one quick snapshot you can get a pretty good idea of how the school is doing.”
Flores Contreras of City Education Partners said letter grades and ratings can start a conversation.
“It’s a starting point, and it’s important to use that data to go and ask other questions,” she said. Then the conversations have to continue, she said. “If a community can do that together, there’s a lot of power there.”
This article has been updated to correctly reflect schools on San Antonio’s North Side that received high ratings from Children at Risk and correct the location of IDEA Carver College Preparatory.
