AUSTIN – Schools in Texas will soon be able to show whether or not they’ve made the grade for the 2023-24 school year following a court ruling.
A decision from the 15th Texas Court of Appeals recently did away with several injunctions that had blocked the Texas Education Agency (TEA) from releasing its A-F accountability ratings for the last full academic year, and those ratings are expected to be released to the public on August 15.
The release of the ratings had been blocked from release by way of a lawsuit, on which many school districts were a party to. In the ruling, Chief Justice Scott Brister of the 15th Texas Court of Appeals, wrote that “It is time for local courts to stop obstructing those policies.”
The A-F ratings for the year prior were only recently released in April, after similar upheaval.
Part of the reason for the lack of accountability ratings also owed to the pandemic, which Brister addressed in his written remarks, but the previous two years’ ratings were held up in courts.
“Millions of dollars and thousands of hours of work by teachers, administrators, and experts have been invested in creating the A to F ratings system; courts can decide only whether it is legal, not whether it is wise or fair, much less commandeer the job of running it,” Brister wrote in his ruling.
The school districts that filed suit against TEA and its commissioner Mike Morath in 2024 alleged that the ratings were based on flawed testing by way of the STAAR (State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness) tests; that computers used in scoring the tests resulted in errors.
Morath, in comments made in a news release to announce the release of the 2022-23 ratings in April, said that 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.”
“Every Texas family deserves a clear view of school performance, and now those families finally have access to data they should have received two years ago. Transparency drives progress, and when that transparency is blocked, students pay the price,” Morath said.
The A-F ratings were first adopted by TEA in 2018, after being established in the 85th legislative session in 2017 through House Bill 22 in order to provide clear and consistent information on schools’ performances.
The metrics covered by the ratings include student achievement, school progress and closing the gaps, and are designed to show continuous improvement, according to TEA.
There were no ratings issued for the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, due to the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic.
