Widespread expectation of worse ratings could spark repeat of last year’s halt of Texas accountability process after a revolt by more than 100 school districts.
The Texas Education Agency plans to release A-F accountability ratings for the 2023-24 school year on Aug. 15, the first official look at grades under the state’s highly contested, raised performance standards, an agency spokesperson said this week.
Lackluster performance on revamped state testing has school districts across Texas anticipating worse grades and lost ground on pandemic recovery efforts under the new system. Similar expectations prompted a lawsuit a year ago that halted the release of the 2022-2023 rankings. Nick Maddox, the lawyer who pushed that case on behalf of more than 100 school districts, said this week that another such suit probably will be filed within weeks in a bid to prevent the latest TEA grades from being released, based largely on objections to the latest standardized tests administered in the spring. School officials agreed that the TEA ratings will show a broad drop in grades and expressed a familiar mix of indifference, annoyance or pushback against the renewed state effort to toughen how they are calculated. “I would be really surprised if you saw any district increase , given not only the changes in testing but the changes in the accountability metrics of how they are determining campus and district ratings,” said Janis Jordan, the Northside Independent School District’s deputy superintendent for curriculum and instruction. The Texas accountability system “has always been a moving target,” making year-to-year comparisons difficult, Jordan said, so Northside ISD regularly monitors student progress instead of waiting for standardized test scores to spot deficiencies. The TEA typically assigns scores to each public school district and campus every year based on standardized test performance, student growth and progress on closing racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps, although it has not done so for all schools since 2019. READ MORE: Southwest ISD joins growing revolt of school districts against TEA report card The state updated the formula to calculate last year’s ratings, which included raising the bar that schools need to reach to qualify for higher letter grades. However, a judge blocked the TEA from officially assigning ratings in 2023 after the lawsuit argued that the agency did not provide enough advance notice about the changes. Texas school districts and individual campuses also did not receive ratings in 2020 or 2021 due to “a declared state of disaster” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, Senate Bill 1365 required the TEA to issue a “Not Rated” label to institutions that would have otherwise received a D or F, meaning some schools did not officially receive a rating during that year either. The TEA assigns 70% of its rating based on students’ achievement or student progress, and the remaining 30% based on the progress closing gaps among students. Scores are expected to decrease amid declines in average State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness scores in math and science this year. Northside ISD, the largest school system in the San Antonio area with more than 100,000 students, received a B on the 2021-2022 accountability system but administrators predict a lower grade this year, Jordan said. RELATED: S.A. schools lag — again — on latest Children at Risk rankings A single letter grade does not accurately capture the success or challenges of a campus, and the district plans to communicate that directly to parents, she said. “If, after a particular lesson or unit, we have a group of students who did not achieve what they needed to, we have mechanisms we put in place right then to help accelerate students so they can get back on target — and none of that’s related to the accountability system,” Jordan said. “So yes, we look at it because we have to, but that is not what drives our daily work.” Northside ISD didn’t join last year’s lawsuit but agreed with its premise, she said. The state’s decision in 2023 to raise the bar on the college, career and military readiness indicator, from a score of 60% to 88%, and then apply it retroactively to students who had already graduated, for example, was “completely inappropriate,” Jordan said. This year, administrators statewide are also perplexed by the number of elementary school students who received a zero on their state standardized essay test questions, which increased by about 20% from 2023. The TEA attributed the spike to a more difficult essay portion this year, but some say the increase raises questions about the agency’s new use of an automated computer model to grade the writing. At Northside, 45% of third graders and 50% of fifth graders received a zero on their constructed response questions this spring on the STAAR English tests. “If the state drops in an area and the vast majority of districts are dropping in the same place, it’s an indication perhaps more so of the nuances of the test and the metric, not that the student is not mastering the content,” Jordan said. The automated grading system will be among the concerns listed in the new lawsuit, Maddox said. “We are challenging the validity of the STAAR test statewide,” he said. “It is our legal opinion that these new changes violate state statute and have not been properly vetted by psychometricians,” the scientists who help to develop tests. For example, psychometricians would likely invalidate a question requiring prior knowledge of a game called “cornhole” because many children of various backgrounds have not played it, Maddox added. The initial lawsuit, which is currently pending in appeals court, produced testimony “that we believe pretty conclusively demonstrates the state did not meet the validity standards for this new test,” he said. “In our opinion, all subsequent scores will be equally invalid.” Maddox said school districts are still being recruited for the new lawsuit, with significant interest from the original plaintiffs and others. Southwest ISD joined the original lawsuit in October. At the time, Superintendent Jeanette Ball said the district’s decision wasn’t because of its own expected grades but the process Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath used and “the principle of it being wrong.” The district received a B for the 2021-22 and 2018-19 school years. During this week’s board meeting, Southwest ISD’s executive director of assessment and accountability, Lisa Bolte, predicted it will get a C for 2023-2024. “We cannot compare 2022 to 2024 because of all the massive sweeping changes that happened,” she said. “It would be like comparing apples and grapes.” Still, district spokesperson Jenny Collier said in a statement that preliminary scores indicate that seven of Southwest ISD campuses will actually improve by a letter grade under the new rankings. “We are treating these results as a baseline and moving forward from here,” Collier said. She said Ball plans to meet with other superintendents next month to discuss the issues and potential outcomes of the new lawsuit before deciding whether to join. To end a state takeover of Houston ISD, that district must keep all of its campuses from earning consecutive failing ratings from the TEA. The district calculated and released unofficial accountability ratings in January based on data from the 2022-23 school year that showed more than 120 schools would have received failing grades if the TEA had released scores last year. HISD’s state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles said last month that he believes the number of schools that earned a failing score will decrease under the upcoming accountability ratings. The district saw several percentage point gains in reading and math performance on the STAAR, even as average performance statewide on the exams largely declined.
Southwest ISD Texas Education Agency Northside Independent School District State Of Texas Assessments Of Academic Children At Risk COVID Senate CCMR Texas Education State Of Texas Assessments Of Academic Readiness Ball Nick Maddox Janis Jordan Jordan Lisa Bolte Jeanette Ball Mike Morath Jenny Collier Mike Miles Texas San Antonio Houston ISD English Bill 1365
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