The trial to decide the fate of a lawsuit targeting the revisions to the state’s accountability system for public school districts has been postponed, leaving Texas school ratings in limbo.
The legal saga over the Texas Education Agency’s (TEA) new A-F accountability system has been prolonged. Next month’s trial, which was to decide the matter, was postponed. Meanwhile, public school ratings for the 2022-2023 school year still have not been released.
The state’s A-F accountability system provides district officials and parents with critical information about the quality of education students receive. As one education policy expert suggested, this accountability is vital to student success.
“The harsh reality of this situation is that when Texas schools don’t have accountability ratings, the group that suffers the most are students,” explained Mary Lynn Pruneda, an advisor with the nonprofit Texas 2036, according to The Texas Tribune. “After the pandemic, only about half of our students are on grade level, and we’re graduating more than 120,000 students each year who aren’t ready for either college or a career.”
High stakes are attached to these ratings, which can impact student enrollment figures, lead to staff shakeups, and influence partnership opportunities.
So when the TEA recently decided to adjust some of its metrics, notably those related to students’ performance on the state STAAR exam and career readiness, several public school districts objected to the stricter requirements. Dozens of school systems joined together in a lawsuit aiming to prevent the release of accountability reports for the 2022-2023 school year, which would include ratings under both the old and the new grading method.
The largest taxpayer-funded district to join the lawsuit attempting to subvert accountability was the Dallas Independent School District, as reported by The Dallas Express. Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde claimed that DISD’s new rating under the stricter metrics would turn parents off of public schools and deplete funding.
“We all know parents do now look at these letter grades when they’re choosing where to live, so this could have an impact on property values, it could have an impact on student enrollment. Anytime you talk about student enrollment, you’re talking about dollars, because the dollars follow our students,” Elizalde said, according to NBC 5 DFW.
The TEA’s accountability report for DISD in the 2021-2022 school year rated 57 campuses a D and 29 more an F, as covered by The Dallas Express.
This fall, a Travis County judge sided with the plaintiffs, filing an injunction on the TEA’s accountability reports for the 2022-2023 school year on the grounds that they are unlawful and would harm districts across the state.
The TEA appealed this decision, yet a new court date is still pending. In the meantime, as Jonathan Feinstein, director of The Education Trust in Texas, suggested, public schools, educators, parents, and other stakeholders are left without “one of their only tools for understanding school performance and advocating for essential programs and resources specifically designed to lift up their most underserved students,” per The Texas Tribune.
As The Dallas Express reported, the continued delay hamstrung DX’s Bad Apple of the Quarter feature, which identifies the Dallas ISD trustee whose education district contains the most students attending schools that received a letter grade of D or below.