Area schools score well on revised TEA rating system
Letter grades are distributed for first time despite fairness criticism
Schools and districts across the Greater Houston area fared similarly to others statewide on the controversial new accountability ratings unveiled by the Texas Education Agency on Wednesday.
The ratings marked the first time school districts were given A-through-F letter grades based largely on standardized test scores. While 47 of 123 local charter and traditional districts were not given an official ranking after receiving accountability waivers tied to Hurricane Harvey, nearly 62 percent of those that were rated earned A’s and B’s; 26 percent were given C’s; and 12 percent received D’s or F’s. Statewide, about 61 percent of districts earned A’s and B’s; 31 percent received C’s; and 7.4 percent were given D’s and F’s.
At the campus level, where schools will not receive official letter grades until 2019, 95 percent of Houston-area schools met the state’s standard and 2.4 percent were rated as “improvement required.” Another 45 schools were not given ratings due to Hurricane Harvey but would have been labeled as “improvement required.”
The new accountability system, which was born out of a 2017 law, generated passionate criticisms and defenses as it was developed. Some superintendents and education association leaders said using A-through-F letter grades would unfairly punish campuses and districts that serve high rates of economically disadvantaged students and that the framework relies too heavily on standardized test performance. Lawmakers and accountability hawks argued the new system will empower parents with easy-to-understand measures of how their students’ schools performed.
TEA Commissioner Mike Morath said the new grading formulas address concerns about economically disadvantaged students by taking the highest of three metrics, including one
comparing academic performance relative to poverty rates, to combine with a measure tied to closing achievement gaps between different demographic groups. Those two measures are used to calculate school and district scale scores that range from zero to 100.
“The design of the new Athrough-F system is really more fair than any other system that has happened in Texas in terms of its appraisal of campus performance,” Morath said at a meeting with reporters a week before the results were published. “It is producing ratings that are not strongly correlated with poverty.”
Of Houston-area schools where 90 percent of more of the students are considered economically disadvantaged by the state, 12 percent earned scores that equal an A letter grade, including schools that were not officially rated due to Hurricane Harvey. That is a smaller share than the 19 percent percent of all Texas schools that earned scale scores equal to an A grade.
Looking at results
Dax Gonzalez, governmental relations division director for the Texas Association of School Boards, said other measures of the rating data show a “pretty significant drop” in scale scores for schools that serve higher rates of poor students.
“I feel that TEA is trying to get to that point where we’re taking more indicators into account, but when you look at it, they’re still basing a huge chunk of the results on STAAR test scores and results,” Gonzalez said. “Having one statewide accountability system for more than 1,200 districts, you’re just not going to capture all of them fairly.”
Harmony School of ScienceHouston, which includes one campus, and rural Devers ISD in Liberty County scored the highest of all Houston-area ISD or charter school districts, both earning a score of 96 and an A grade overall. Rounding out the top local districts were Barbers Hill ISD and Friendswood ISD, which earned a score of 95, and Houston Gateway Academy, Harmony School of Excellence and Pearland ISD, each of which earned 94s.
The lowest-performing district in the state, A+ Unlimited Potential charters, also is located in Greater Houston. It earned a score of 45. Damon ISD earned a score of 50, charter district Meyerpark Elementary earned a 62 and Comquest Academy charter district received a 62. Santa Fe ISD, where 10 were killed and 13 were injured in a mass shooting on May 18, earned a score of 63 even though the district did not receive an official rating due to Hurricane Harvey. The vast majority of students there were tested weeks before a 17-year-old gunman opened fire at the district’s sole high school.
Three Houston-area campuses received the highest scores of any schools in the state, earning a 99 out of 100: Spring Branch Academic Institute in Spring Branch ISD, and DeBakey and Carnegie Vanguard high schools in Houston ISD. Another nine local schools earned 98 out of 100 points.
The Lane School in Aldine ISD earned the third lowest rating in the state, a 34. Other local schools with low scores were A+Up University charter (44), Victory Prep Academy South charter (48), The Varnett School Southeast charter (49) and Kashmere High in Houston ISD (49).
If individual schools were assigned letter grades based on scale scores, 21 percent of those in the greater Houston area would have received an A, 33 percent would be given a B, 31 percent would have gotten a C, 10 percent would be labeled as D, and 5 percent, or 84 schools, would have received an F.
Scores despite Harvey
Local schools that were among the most devastated by Hurricane Harvey seemed to perform well. Kingwood and Summer Creek high schools in Humble ISD met the state’s academic standards after having to share a campus for most of the 2017-18 school year. C.E. King High in Sheldon ISD, which flooded and saw more than 65 of its students lose their homes in the storm, also met the state’s standard, scoring a 78 out of 100 possible points on the accountability system’s scale score. Creech Elementary in Katy ISD, and Robinson, Braeburn, Scarborough, Kolter and Mitchell elementaries in Houston ISD also met the state’s academic standard after their campuses flooded.
Nowhere were individual school ratings more consequential than in the Houston Independent School district, where four campuses had to be rated as “met standard” or risk triggering school closures or a state takeover of the entire district. All four campuses — Mading and Wesley elementaries, Woodson PK-8 and Worthing High — met the state’s standard this year, staving off potential state actions.
How grades assessed
The state’s new accountability system bases 70 percent of each school and district rating on the highest scaled score earned among three categories: raw student achievement, student progress and performance relative to percentages of economically disadvantaged students. Another 30 percent of the grades were determined by schools’ and districts’ success in closing achievement gaps between different demographic groups, including at-risk students, English-language learners and students of different races.
Officials use those metrics to calculate an overall scale score that ranges from zero to 100, which match up with letter grades: Any scale score below a 60 translates to F, a score between 60 and 69 equates to a D, a score between 70 and 79 would be rated a C, a score between 80 and 89 would be a B, and a score of 90 or above would garner an A.
Those scores are almost exclusively based on how well students performed on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, tests at the elementary and middle school levels. For high schools, officials measure test scores as well as graduation rates and college and career readiness.
Although Barbers Hill ISD was rated as an A largely due to high test scores, Superintendent Greg Poole said parents should only use the ratings as one measure of schools’ success. He compared it to a school winning a state championship in football, saying that one accomplishment does not define how well a school serves its students.
“This truly is just one measure,” Poole said. “We’re excited, but we don’t put extra emphasis on these scores because we’re not going to be driven by testing, either.”