Dallas Independent School District voted on Thursday to join several other school districts in a lawsuit against Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath following an announcement by the Texas Education Agency that it would be delaying the release of accountability reports for the 2022-2023 school year.
At a school board briefing in the afternoon, trustees voted unanimously to add the system’s name to a lawsuit seeking an injunction to stop upcoming updates to how campuses and districts are graded by the Texas Education Agency (TEA).
“Dallas ISD has always prided itself on holding ourselves accountable,” said Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde, reported The Dallas Morning News. “That being said, we also think that when we are evaluating students or teachers or any members of our team, that they should always know what exactly they’re being evaluated on, prior to the completion or conclusion of their evaluation.”
Kingsville ISD, Crowley ISD, Spring Branch ISD, Canutillo ISD, Del Valle ISD, Frisco ISD, Killeen ISD, Copperas Cove ISD, and Corpus Christi ISD, among others, have also joined the suit in recent weeks.
Morath said TEA revised how it calculates accountability scores to make sure schools continue to work towards improving student outcomes. The methodology has not been updated since 2017.
However, as previously reported by The Dallas Express, changes to how the agency scores “College, Career, and Military Readiness” (CCMR) at high schools prompted criticism from school districts that claimed the update would “artificially” lower the scores of school systems and individual campuses.
Elizalde, for instance, alleged that the criteria changes were meant to make it appear as if “public schools are failing.”
“What used to be an A is now a D. None of these approaches are consistent with best practices in anything we would do with students in grading at schools,” she claimed in a previous interview with the DMN.
A downward revision of Dallas ISD’s student achievement scores in particular would likely not fare well for the school system’s academic record. According to Dallas ISD’s latest accountability report for the 2021-2022 school year, only 59% of the 8,003 students who graduated that year met the criteria to be considered CCMR.
Additionally, only 41% of students districtwide scored at grade level on their STAAR exams, and nearly 20% of students in the graduating Class of 2022 earned a high school diploma in four years. The statewide average was 90%.
“We think the lawsuit is without merit, but you go to court, judges opine,” Morath said earlier in the week, per the DMN.
Regardless, Dallas ISD parents will have to wait to see how their child’s neighborhood campus did last school year as the TEA announced it will delay the release of accountability reports.
In a press release published on Tuesday, the TEA said that accountability scores will probably not be released until around a month after the originally scheduled date of September 28.
“Maintaining high expectations helps guide our efforts to improve student learning and support,” said Morath, per the release. “The A-F system is designed to properly reflect how well our schools are meeting those high expectations, and the adjustments we are making this year will ensure it continues to serve as a tool for parents and educators to help our students.”
The TEA proposed its methodology changes in January and elicited feedback from the public, which advised taking into consideration the learning loss and disruptive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“TEA proposed setting goals using a baseline of the average level of student growth for the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years” in order to account for the pandemic. “However, since that time, statewide growth data for the 2022-23 school year has become available,” the agency said in the press release.
“Analysis of that growth data shows that the 2021-22 growth was more anomalous than expected, so setting baselines that partially incorporate data from the 2021-22 school year may not adequately take into account the impact of the pandemic,” TEA added.
Some 57 Dallas ISD campuses received a D letter grade that school year for their student achievement outcomes, and 29 earned an F, despite the hard work of the district’s dedicated teachers and principals, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.