Dallas ISD Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde acknowledged that the district’s Texas Education Agency (TEA) accountability rating would likely fall for the 2022-2023 school year under new proposed rating guidelines.
The new rating system will average the scores of individual campuses rather than assigning a single score for the entire district based on the total number of students. Other changes include revamping how the TEA scores College, Career, and Military Readiness (CCMR) for high schools. Final changes to the rating system, however, will not be finalized until later in the summer.
Such a change will likely have a big impact on Dallas ISD, which has already been struggling academically in terms of student achievement metrics. Last school year, only 41% of students scored at grade level on their STAAR exams, and almost 20% of its Class of 2022 failed to graduate on time, despite the hard work of the district’s dedicated teachers.
In an interview with The Dallas Morning News, Elizalde claimed that the new rating system was designed to make it appear that “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,” Elizalde alleged.
She provided the news outlet with a data analysis of campus scores for the 2021-2022 school year, which claimed that the number of middle and high schools receiving an overall D or F rating would increase significantly under the new proposed system. In terms of student achievement scores, 57 of all campuses received a D, and 29 got an F, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
“We want to make sure that we provide an accurate year-over-year performance picture so that parents can have that information to help inform them in terms of how they support their kiddos,” TEA Commissioner Mike Morath said at a media briefing, The Dallas Morning News reported.
The new rating system comes at a time when support for statewide school choice legislation appears to be on the rise while public school enrollment steadily declines.
“Traditional K-12 schools are hemorrhaging enrollment due to growing concerns over content, quality, and the politicization of the classroom. This steep decline is evidence that parents are ready for something different, something better,” said James Quintero of the Texas Public Policy Foundation in a previous statement to The Dallas Express.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, more than 200 school boards across the state signed on to a letter of protest against some of the proposed changes, which harped on the CCMR issue.
“These significant changes to the cut score for CCMR will have drastic impacts to school ratings across Texas. The A-F system was designed to make it easier for the public to understand how schools are truly performing. But increasing the cut score for an A for CCMR by almost 47% in a single year will create the misconception that high performing schools are drastically declining, even if their CCMR performance actually improved,” reads the letter.