In 2015, the 84^th Legislative session passed House Bill 2804, mandating that the TEA accountability system should rate districts and campuses state-wide on an A-F system, spanning over five domains, which are then combined for a single A-F overall rating. The new A-F system will not officially take effect until the 2017-2018 school year, however, law requires a work-in-progress stage, where school districts across the state recently received preliminary reports which have raised some concerns for educators and parents alike.

The Texas Association of School Administrators (TASA) recently released an article where they said that “A-F school ratings do more harm than good. They create confusion among educators, and fail to offer the public useful or accurate information about their schools.”

They continued, saying that “advocates of such rating systems use terms such as “simple,” “clear,” and “transparent” to describe them,” however, the calculations used for the five domains are anything but simple, clear, and transparent. For a start, this new A-F system does not translate to what parents and educators currently equate to an A-F grade. For example, in a typical A-F grading system, anything below a 70 is an “F”, however, in TEA’s proposed A-F accountability system, any score below a 90 is considered an “F” in one of the domains. In fact, the entire A-D scale occurs between scores 90-98. Imagine if a school district graded their students on such a scale.

Conversely, in another domain, any score above a 60 is considered an “A”. These types of inconsistencies within the same grading scale are not only confusing and irrational, but seemingly unfair to the students, teachers, and community. In yet another of the five domains, the calculations used to determine a campus’s score are so convoluted that it is actually possible to receive a negative score in that area, which is certainly not aligned with what parents and educators have come to expect from an A-F letter grading system.

The inconsistencies of the A-F system extend further as we examine the domain that is meant to measure a campus’s “post-secondary readiness”. For an elementary campus, this domain score is calculated solely on attendance, which in no way reflects the school’s academic readiness for the next phase of learning. That same domain score for a high school campus does not calculate attendance at all.

Additionally, one of the domains is measured only with test scores of students who are economically disadvantaged. However, for a campus to be measured with this domain, it must have a minimum of 40 economically disadvantaged students enrolled. It stands to reason that wealthier campuses, with little to no economically disadvantaged students, will not be rated under this domain, therefore unfairly punishing poorer campuses with lower ratings based on life circumstances that are beyond their control. The disparities present in the A-F system are further highlighted by the fact that there are no allowances made for a diverse population of students. For example, Special Education, dyslexia, and Bilingual students are all required to take the exact same test as all other students and held to the same passing standard. Therefore, any campus with a larger population of students with learning disabilities will have significantly lower scores than a campus without, which will not necessarily represent the effectiveness of that campus’s educators or the academic strides made by its students.

The preliminary rating reports, received by all Texas schools, were based on the 2015-2016 test scores, which is arguably flawed data in and of itself due to issues with the transition to the new state testing contractor. These reports suggest that, under the A-F system, campuses that may have met the state standard and received multiple distinctions under the current accountability system could potentially receive anywhere between a C-F rating in some areas. This evidence suggests that the proposed A-F system is directly contradictory to the current accountability system used in the state of Texas in terms of what is considered outstanding academic achievement.

“Being that the calculations and composition to the proposed A-F system are only preliminary, I would encourage all educators, parents and community members to educate themselves on the detrimental effects that an A-F rating system can have on schools and communities. We owe it to our children to provide feedback to our legislators and charge them with creating a system that is fair, useful, and representative of schools’ actual growth and performance,” said GISD Superintendent, Don Jefferies.