As HISD cheers gains, sanctions tied to failing school draw near
Area fares better than ‘POVERTY IS NOT DESTINY’: Texas’ average on new A-to-F grading system
For years, Stephens Elementary School in Aldine ISD has been defined by the challenges that it faces rather than its academic successes.
Nearly 90 percent of its students are considered economically disadvantaged by the Texas Education Agency. Nearly half are English language learners. And to state education officials, the school was failing academically.
On Thursday, though, the state’s accountability rating system showed the school had risen from what would have been a D grade last year to an A grade now. Of roughly 8,200 schools in Texas, only 19 made such a dramatic jump, and of those, only six had student populations in which 80 percent or more of the students were economically disadvantaged.
TEA Commissioner Mike Morath lauded the improved ratings in a visit to the school Thursday, thanking educators for their work.
“This is not an easy environment to work in, but the thing is the educators in Stephens Elementary start the day with the belief that all children can learn — they can achieve at high levels, they can learn reading, writing and math,” Morath said. “The educators here at Aldine and Stephens elementary are proof positive that
poverty is not destiny.”
The ratings released Thursday marked the first time that individual campuses have been assigned A-through-F letter grades by the TEA, and while more Houstonarea schools earned A grades and fewer D’s and F’s on the ratings than the state as a whole, the relatively high grades were not enough to protect Houston ISD from coming state sanctions.
Of more than 1,500 local schools, 56.5 percent got A or B grades compared with 61 percent statewide. While 11.2 percent of local schools received D’s or F’s, the figure was 14 percent statewide.
The number of schools statewide that earned A’s and B’s rose 6 percentage points from 55 percent in 2018. The share of D and F schools, meanwhile, decreased only slightly.
Although Morath praised the work of Aldine ISD schools and others that performed well despite serving high numbers of students living in poverty, critics of the A-through-F system say it disproportionately gives lower grades to higher-poverty schools.
A Houston Chronicle analysis of the grades found that local schools with larger rates of economically disadvantaged students did not earn A’s at the rate of other local and statewide schools. Only about 10 percent of Houston-area schools where more than half of the students received free or reduced-price lunches earned A’s. About 15.2 percent earned D’s or F’s.
Kevin Brown, executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators, said the current system relies too heavily on standardized test scores. Poor students tend to score lower on such tests than their wealthier peers. He said the state tried to account for those challenges with complicated formulas and weights and rules, but boiling those nuances down to one letter grade does not provide parents or community members with an accurate picture of how some campuses are serving kids.
“The manual on this A-to-F system is more than 100 pages long with all kinds of rules and tweaks and all these kind of things,” Brown said. “That somehow we’re going to come up with one letter grade to tell you how schools are doing is really nonsense in my opinion.”
Still, some campuses and districts in lower-income areas performed well on the ratings.
Waller ISD, located on the fringes of the northwest Houston area, was the only local district to earn an A while serving higher rates of poorer students. The state considers nearly 65 percent of students there to be economically disadvantaged.
District officials said Thursday that Waller ISD schools began focusing on creating smaller class sizes last year, especially at the elementary level. None of its elementary school classrooms had more than 22 students assigned to one teacher. Teachers were also encouraged to focus on “firsttime instruction,” or drilling down on concepts the first time they’re introduced to ensure students grasp them quickly, according to Sarah Marcus, a district spokeswoman.
“This is our second year to get an A, but in Waller it’s not about a single day of testing for our kids,” Marcus said. “It’s about individualized instruction for our kids all year long, it’s about amazing teachers in all of our classrooms, it’s about creating that family atmosphere.”
Size was also a defining factor for Goose Creek CISD’s Impact Early College High School, which earned an overall accountability score of 99 out of 100 even though more than 63 of its students were considered economically disadvantaged.
Principal Laura Reyes said the school’s experienced teaching staff can build better relationships with students and have more one-on-one time thanks to the school’s relatively small size — about 400 students. Unlike some other early-college high schools that accept only students who meet certain academic criteria, Reyes said the only requirements for their students is that they live in the district and are preparing to enter ninth grade.
“Teachers hold them accountable, and regardless of who you are, where you’re from, what you came from, these are the expectations,” Reyes said. “And they’ll work with the kids to get there.”
And although Houston ISD earned an 88, or B grade, the district faces state sanctions because one of its long-struggling campuses — Wheatley High School — received a failing grade for at least the fifth year in a row. A state law passed several years ago mandates that if one school within a district makes a failing grade for five consecutive years, the TEA must either close the school or replace the district’s locally elected school board with state appointees.
TEA officials have not yet said what actions they will take against Houston ISD in light of Wheatley’s F grade, but the district is also reeling from a recent state investigation that found several instances of alleged misconduct by some trustees and that recommended their replacement.
Statewide, data show far more districts earned A’s and B’s this year and fewer received C’s, D’s and F’s. The number of districts that received an A grade shot up from 17 percent in 2018 to 25 percent in 2019, and the number given a B grade jumped from 43 percent to 57 percent. At the same time, the TEA reported the following drops for schools statewide: from 29 percent to 13 percent for a C grade; from 8 percent to 4 percent for a D grade; and from 4 percent to 1 percent for districts that received an F grade.
However, 47 of the greater Houston region’s traditional and charter school districts were not given accountability ratings last year after receiving a waiver tied to Hurricane Harvey impacts.
The state’s accountability system bases 70 percent of school and district ratings on the highest scaled score earned in one of three categories: raw student achievement, student progress and performance relative to percentages of economically disadvantaged students. The remaining 30 percent of the grades are generated by measuring how schools and districts close achievement gaps among different groups of students, including those who are English language learners, at-risk students and students of different racial and ethnic groups.
Those scores will be used to calculate schools’ and districts’ overall scale scores, which range from zero to 100. Scores below 60 would indicate an F grade, while a score of 90 and above would qualify as an A.
The measures used to create those scale scores are based almost solely on how students performed on the 2018-2019 State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, known as STAAR, at the elementary and middle school levels. For high schools, officials measure students’ test scores as well as graduation rates and college and career readiness metrics.