School districts get A-F grades this week
Many educators don’t like system, but offifficial calls it ‘win’ for parents.
Texas school districts will receive letter grades this week under a new statewide rating system unpopular among public school offifficials.
On Wednesday, the Texas Education Agency will label school districts with an A, B, C, D or F and campuses with a rating of “met requirement” or “improvement required,” based on performance in the 2017-18 school year.
Campuses will not be graded under the A-F system until 2019 because state lawmakers, facing pressure from superintendents and school boards, last year postponed implementation. Even so, campuses will receive a numeric grade on a 0-100 scale.
“It’s a signifificant improvement over the prior system,” Education Commissioner Mike Morath told reporters Tuesday. “The idea that you can provide clear summative information to parents is
a huge win for parents. The idea that the design of the system was meant to highlight both high levels of student achievement and high levels of educator impac t makes this essentially the fairest system in the state of Texas.”
The public can see the ratings at TxSchools.org on Wednesday.
Since lawmakers approved creating an A-F system in 2015, public school offifficials have complained that the system heavily relies on student performance on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness and not on more holistic measures. They also fear assigning letter grades would stigmatize the public school system rather than improve it.
“We believe the rating system still relies too much on standardized testing and that low-income kids still get a disproportionate amount of low grades on STAAR tests. When campuses start being graded next year, we believe
that most of the D’s and F’s will be in low-income neighborhoods. Those schools need more resources from the state, not higher stakes from their tests,” said Clay Robison of the Texas State Teachers Association.
Morath said last week that the A-F system compares districts and schools with sim- ilar poverty rates to avoid penalizing high-poverty campuses with lower grades.
Agency officials will release a report in December that will show what letter grades campuses would have received if they had been graded under the A-F system, but the results will be for informational purposes.
The A-F system sizes up districts, and later schools, in three categories:
■ “Student achievement” measures how well students performed on the STAAR and how well high school students performed on college and career readiness measures and their graduation rates.
■ “School progress” consists of two subcategories that measure how many students improved on the STAAR, as well as school and district performance compared with other campuses and districts with similar percentages of low-income students. Only the subcategory with the higher score will count toward the overall school progress score.
■ “Closing the gap” measures how well students performed based on their race or ethnicity, income level, disability and other factors that might affect learning.
Only the higher grade in the school progress and student achievement categories will be counted. That higher grade counts for 70 percent of the overall campus or district grade. The closing the gap score counts for 30 percent of the overall grade.
If a district or school earns three F’s among the four grades calculated in the student achievement and closing the gap categories and the two school progress subcategories, the overall grade must be an F. Morath said this rule will give a more accurate assessment of the
overall performance of a district or campus.
Some superintendents are concerned that the rule contradicts wording in state law that allows only the higher
score in the student progress or student achievement categories to count.
“It forces school districts and campuses to earn an F,” said Casey McCreary with the Texas Association of School Administrators, which has long been wary of implementing the A-F system.
Morath said there won’t be major changes to the A-F system for the next five years so that the public can get an accurate picture of how
school and district ratings change over time. Under the law, however, districts will be able to develop their own rating systems to be implemented at a future date. The Austin school district is piloting a local rating system.