Texas School Accountability Ratings are now out — Here’s how to check your school or district’s grade
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) released its school and district accountability ratings, assigning an ‘A to F’ rating for all Texas public schools and districts on April 24. The ratings are from the 2023 survey, but they’re being released now after a 19-month court battle that involved numerous school districts filing a lawsuit against the TEA for changing its standards for the grades.
Texas Education Agency has released school and district accountability ratings.(UnSplash)
How to check the grades?
Since their grades are being made public now, this is how you can check your school’s and district’s grades from the TEA accountability rating system:
1. Go to the TEA website’s accountability system page at https://tea.texas.gov/texas-schools/accountability/academic-accountability/performance-reporting/2023-accountability-rating-system-0.
2. Click on “Search accountability reports.”
3. When the accountability reports for 2022-2023 go live at 8:30 AM, you can use the dropdowns to search for your district or individual school.
4. When you find your school or district on the search tool, click “view reports” and an overall letter grade will be displayed.
To search for your school’s or district’s grades, you can also visit the state’s TXschools.gov website.
What about the ratings?
Schools and districts in Texas didn’t get their ratings at all in 2020 or 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, Texas lawmakers spared the schools with low ratings from releasing the scores, so that they could recover from the pandemic’s disruptions. Since the TEA made changes to the accountability rating system, they have triggered lawsuits from 120 districts across the state to block the release of their ratings.
The benchmarks to reach the highest ratings were raised for certain districts – such as high schools can only receive an ‘A’ rating if 88% of its seniors enrol in college, pursue a non-college career, or enter the military. Prior to the change, the benchmark was 60% of the seniors.
Each year, the TEA gives a district letter grade from ‘A’ to ‘F’, which is given by considering standardised test results, annual academic growth, graduation rates, and college, career, and military readiness. The lawsuits against it alleged that the changes were unfair as the new methods were not provided to districts at the beginning of the 2022-23 session as required by the state statute.
District ratings are also based on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR test), which is an annual statewide standardised test that measures the understanding of students who are enrolled in the state-mandated core curriculum.
