Judge blocks TEA from releasing A-F scores during lawsuit – Houston Chronicle

At least 100 school districts have joined the suit, arguing the changes are unfair and could lay the groundwork for future state sanctions. Districts with a campus that receives a failing grade for five straight years open themselves up to state takeover, such as what happened to Houston ISD this summer. 

Superintendents who sued the agency celebrated the temporary injunction Friday morning. A trial remains set for Feb. 12, but state District Judge Catherine Mauzy found the districts “made a sufficient showing” that TEA shouldn’t be allowed to implement the formula without giving them the advance notice required by law — and that doing so would cause irreparable harm. 

In a joint statement, the plaintiffs said they were pleased with the ruling “on behalf of public school superintendents, boards of trustees, and all the students, teachers, and staff of the great state of Texas whom we serve.”

“We look forward to future conversations with Commissioner of Education Mike Morath about how to implement the assessment and accountability system in a manner that is fair and transparent for all school districts in the State of Texas,” the statement said.

TEA officials said they would appeal the decision immediately. 

“This ruling completely disregards the laws of this state and for the foreseeable future, prevents any A-F performance information from being issued to help millions of parents and educators improve the lives of our students,” a TEA statement reads. “The A-F system has been a positive force in Texas public education, supporting improved outcomes for students across the state, especially those most vulnerable.”

“There have been many constructive conversations about the methodology with districts and among legislators,” TEA continued. “Though about 10% of our school system leaders disagreed with the methods used in A-F enough to file this lawsuit, the complete absence of public performance information means that 100% of our school systems cannot take actions based on these ratings, stunting the academic growth of millions of Texas kids.”

The agency had delayed the release of the 2022-2023 scores because the new scoring system was resulting in more drastic accountability drops than TEA expected, Morath has said. The agency planned to tweak the formula to account to the amount of catch-up students had to play in 2022 after the pandemic, he said.

 In the Houston area, the Cypress-Fairbanks, Humble, Klein, Splendora, Spring, Spring Branch and Willis school districts are part of the litigation. 

The new formula upped the bar that schools need to reach to qualify for letter grades and was expected to cause a drop of at least one grade for many schools, even when STAAR scores improve, some administrators said. 

Specifically, the planned changes relate to a section of the A-F formula known as “growth” scores, which looks at year-over-year STAAR test scores to measure what percentage of students are on track. Schools are entitled to be graded based on whichever score is higher: their raw performance on STAAR tests or their growth scores.

The percentage of campuses that used the “growth” score to calculate their A-F rating surged to more than half last year, up from only 19% in 2019.
The spike was due to COVID-19, Morath said: STAAR scores decreased in the early years of the pandemic, before rising significantly in 2022 when students returned back to schools. The result was an exceptionally high growth year.

The agency had planned to use the 2022 growth numbers as part of the new grading baseline, but then the 2023 growth numbers dipped closer to the pre-pandemic scores.  As a result, many schools would have seen their accountability grades suffer. 

TEA last updated its accountability system in 2017, the same year lawmakers passed legislation that the agency can update the formula any time during the school year before the grades’ release. The school districts fighting the suit have argued that the legislation at least entitles them to be given adequate notice on changes before the rules are applied.