School districts across Texas are bracing for low state-assessed letter grades after an overhaul of the accountability system by the Texas Education Agency, just one year after many celebrated historically high ratings.
Every year since 2018, parents and community members across Texas have waited at the start of the school year to see how their neighborhood school and district score on the state’s A-F accountability rating system. Southside Independent School District celebrated earning an A-rating at a campus for the first time last year.
But an overhaul of the system by the TEA this year has school districts bracing for dramatic declines in the grades due to changes to the cutoffs for letter grades and other formula changes. That means some schools could see lower scores despite increases from the previous year.
District leaders told the San Antonio Report they were caught off guard by the major changes, which they say diminish the work they have been doing, but Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath said this month that the changes are necessary to keep pace with the nation in terms of academic rigor and achievement.
Most years, district staff can predict the scores, which are based on three domains: Student Achievement, School Progress and Closing the Gaps, each made up of multiple indicators. The better of School Progress and Student Achievement makes up 70% of the score, while Closing the Gaps makes up the remaining 30%. Massive growth made from gains following the initial decline in scores during the pandemic buoyed high grades at districts across the state last year.
The letter grades have become one of the most forward-facing representations of how a school district is doing, prominently featured in media roundups and pointed to in debates by policymakers on the state and local levels.
Those representations have taken on added importance in recent months as policymakers in Austin cite failing public schools when arguing for voucher-like programs that would allow parents to use public tax dollars to send their children to private schools. The debate is expected to return to the Legislature during a special session promised by Gov. Greg Abbott.
The optics of potentially lower grades come at a pivotal time for school districts, with many facing declining enrollment and most competing for students with charter schools and other open enrollment school districts. The grades are also a selling point, or the opposite, for parents looking to move into a certain area.
Laura Perez, for example, who has one child who attends school in the Northside Independent School District and another in a charter school, said she has been looking at the letter grades of schools as she prepares for a move.
“When I was looking at schools, I saw a home, and the school district had a D rating. So I’m like, no way am I going to do that to my kids,” she said. “Then I saw another that had a C rating, but their graduation rates … were not good enough for me.”
Understanding the changes
The seismic shift in the formula is expected to upend ratings for even the highest-performing schools.
For example, the Alamo Heights Independent School District had 94% of graduates accepted into college and others enlisted in the military this year. But those admissions don’t count toward the College, Career and Military Readiness (CCMR) score, which for high schools makes up 40% of the Student Achievement grade. Instead, indicators including the number of students passing AP exams, earning industry-based certifications and taking dual credit courses count toward that score.
Under the new CCMR formula, the district is now expected to receive a C.
“We strive to be a college prep district that prepares kids to go on to college [or] a career, [or] join the military,” Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction Jimmie Walker said. “We spent 12 years getting students ready to go on to leave us and be successful, and the fact that all of those efforts now may result in a C for College, Career and Military Readiness is frustrating.”
The new criteria are also being retroactively applied to last year’s graduates for scores this fall, giving districts no way to make changes to influence the grade.
Morath said the increase in requirements for CCMR to receive an A, which went from 60% to 88%, reflects progress made in recent years and the mandate from the Legislature to continue improving.
“When cut points were set in 2017, only 47% of kids graduated from Texas public schools ready for College, Career, Military,” he said. “[In the] most recent graduating class [it was] closer to 65%.”
Under the previous system, Morath said, changes would have been made incrementally over the years, but that isn’t what districts wanted.
“Most school leaders that we talked to around the state want consistency year over year in the system. They don’t want to go back to the old way of doing accountability in Texas where there were these small changes made every year,” he said. “You either save up all your changes and make them at one point or you make small changes year over year over year.”
But district leaders told the Report that they were caught off guard by the magnitude of the changes.
“If they had said three years ago, ‘Hey, in three years … there will be a big stairstep’, we could have prepared for it, although that would have been difficult with a pandemic,” Walker said. “But this just was not on the horizon. And it seems like a retroactive explanation for something rather than a long-term plan that they had going into this.”
Walker also said the whiplash is frustrating for teachers, who have been able to improve scores but could see lower grades.
Other changes include the way districts will be measured in the Closing the Gaps domain, which looks at how districts are serving at-risk groups such as emergent bilingual students, special-needs students and foster children.
While the old system looked at data for all the groups, the new one will measure districts only on how they met goals regarding the lowest-scoring student groups.
The changes are large enough, district administrators say, that it will be all but impossible to compare the ratings to years past. As a bridge, the TEA is releasing “what if” reports that apply the new measurements and changes to last year’s scores.
Using that bridge, BranDe Merriman, North East Independent School District’s director of accountability and assessments, showed board members this week how the district would have fared for Closing the Gaps. Under that domain, the district would have more A’s and fewer B’s, but also more D’s and F’s.
“So some campuses went up, some campuses went down,” she said. “How can that happen? There’s a lot of different ways.”
Changes that contributed to that number include lowering the number of students in a student group at a particular school to be counted from 25 to 10, and changing the grading mechanism from a pass/fail to a 0-4 ranking depending on progress toward meeting goals.
“When you change how you’re going to score things, then that’s going to change the scores,” she said.
Another change coming in the newest round of accountability scores will be a more detailed public display of data through txschools.gov in a bid to increase transparency, according to Morath.
The new system also changes the way districts are graded. Instead of looking at the district as one giant school and rating all the students enrolled — the new formula will instead take the average of all campus scores, something Morath said has always been logical.
With that in mind, Merriman also reported that the district’s much-celebrated score of 89 last year, the first since the system was paused amid the COVID pandemic, would be scored as an 81 under the new system.
That incensed board members, including trustee Sandra Hughey.
“All I can think of is our teachers have done an amazing job of catching our students back up after COVID and everything else,” she said. “This seems like a deliberate attempt to make us look bad.”
In the ‘zone of uncertainty’
As districts wait to see what the final changes will be, they are also waiting for guidance on how a new version of the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) test will be graded. In the meantime, they have an opaque scale given by the TEA that shows whether students “likely passed,” “likely failed” or fell in the “zone of uncertainty.”
NEISD Superintendent Sean Maika said that vague identifier kept some students in the dark about whether they were eligible to graduate this year, until after the ceremony had passed.
“What we did is we made the decision to allow them to walk, but we had principals or somebody from the campus call the parent to say, ‘I want you to understand your child scored in the zone of uncertainty. We’re not going to hold them back from walking, but understand they may walk but not be able to graduate.’ So we had to hold their diploma because they hadn’t met the requirement from the state in order to graduate on the 31st,” he said.
The district did not confirm whether any students that walked the stage ultimately did not meet the requirements.
Maika said the situation is unique in his nearly three decades in education.
“This is like going to a tax accountant and saying, ‘I want you to make sure my taxes when you file them are 100% error-free, but I’m actually not going to give you the tax law until like after you filed my taxes. Then I’m gonna grade you on your success,'” he said. We won’t know the final accountability manual until August of this coming school year. For those taking tabs here at home, we took this assessment back in April.”
That delay has made planning for the next school year difficult. Another COVID-era law, House Bill 4545 signed into law in 2021, requires districts to provide extra tutoring for students that fail the STAAR exam. But without the final grades, Maika said the district is left to make that decision before they have all the information.
“We’re trying to create plans that inform us to move next year to help students grow … and we don’t have data,” he said. “And by the time we get it, I call it trailing data … it’s not good anymore, because we’ve already started the year, we’ve already created classes … we’ve already done groupings.”
As a result, schedule changes, tutoring additions and other unknown actions may have to be taken once the school year has already started.
Maika said the district will be giving “something to parents to at least give them sort of a briefing on … what to expect [and] trying to explain what’s really going on here.”
Walker, the Alamo Heights ISD administrator, said the district has continued to lobby the TEA to make changes, particularly to the CCMR indicator, to no avail.
“We provided feedback, we’ve made our voice known,” she said. “But it doesn’t seem like there’s been much responsiveness or empathy to the feedback that we’ve had.”
Focusing on the classroom
While administrators brace for the scores, teachers in the classroom are focused on the task at hand.
Ben Keenan, an Alamo Heights High School English teacher, has seen changes come and go in his nearly two decades as a teacher.
“Anytime you have kind of those high stakes assessments, and there’s some type of change, there’s always an uptick in anxiety,” he said. “Over 18 years, I’ve kind of just adopted sort of a stoic trust that those measurements are going to change. [You] just kind of have to trust your primary task in the classroom and the relationships you have with the students and your knowledge of the content and trust that those measurements will kind of share the same things you’re seeing on the ground floor, so to speak.”
In Alamo Heights ISD, the district uses a Community Based Accountability System, which goes 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.
Keenan said the letter grade has been one part of that in the past as a way to explain the various domains in common language, while the more in-depth accountability scores are used internally to help target instruction.
Historically, teachers have also reverse-engineered standardized tests and accountability metrics to find areas to target instruction moving forward. With major changes, that process has to be adjusted, as well, Keenan said, but with summer learning already underway, teachers are taking the changes in stride.
“Those nuanced things are kind of like building sand castles,” he said. “Waves hit, [but] we’re still on the beach, we’re still excited about building sand castles. It is just going to be figuring it out again.”
