AUSTIN – Last Thursday, the Texas Education Agency (TEA), released the long-awaited accountability ratings for public schools across the state.
The letter-grade ratings represent the performance of the 2022-23 school year. They had long been held in limbo, as the first complete set of the ratings in five years, due to litigation and pauses to the system due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of the five school districts in Tyler County, most made passing marks, district-wide, with Spurger and Warren earning “B” letter grades, Colmesneil and Woodville ISDs earning “C”s and Chester ISD earning a “D.”
According to numbers from TEA, of the 8,539 schools evaluated through the system, roughly one in five public schools received a D or an F overall letter grade.
Part of the reason for the delay in the ratings owes to a lawsuit, on which about 120 school districts filed, claiming that TEA had not given them adequate notice before establishing more stringent college and career readiness metrics.
The TEA’s 2023 ratings also show that the number of campuses having received passing grades through the A-F accountability system, dropped by 14% from 2022 when the last complete set of ratings were released. About half of the state’s campuses received grades of “A” or “B.”
Mike Morath, who serves as TEA Commissioner, said that the decline in grades is due to a drop in academic growth as schools have worked to recover from losses due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
Morath, in a statement, also addressed the lawsuits filed that held the ratings from release.
“For far too long families, educators and communities have been denied access to information about the performance of their schools, thanks to frivolous lawsuits paid for by tax dollars filed by those who disagreed with the statutory goals of raising career readiness expectations to help students,” Morath said.
The ratings for the 2024-25 school year are reportedly going to be issued in August, where the ratings from the 2023-24 academic term are delayed due to a separate lawsuit.
An appeals court greenlit TEA to make the 2023 metrics public in a ruling stating that Morath had the authority to change scoring metrics, earlier in April.
According to a report in the Texas Tribune, many school district leaders have attributed the statewide declines to the stricter college and career readiness standards implements. In the new standards, schools were made to show that 88% of graduating high school seniors were college or career ready in order to earn an “A.”
Morath said that new standard was a way to “keep raising the bar so that Texas is a leader in preparing students for post-secondary success.”
