TEA shares 2023 school accountability grades after legal fight. Do they mean much?
After nearly two years of delays and legal wrangling, the Texas Education Agency released 2023 A-F accountability scores for schools across the state Thursday, April 24.
The agency gave the Fort Worth Independent School District a D for 2023, with 77 of the district’s 108 campuses receiving D or F ratings. But the state’s top education official acknowledged that the ratings, which were originally scheduled to be released more than a year and a half ago, are too far out of date to be of much use to families who want to see how their kids’ schools stack up.
“It’s an unfortunate fact that we’ve been stymied by what is ultimately frivolous litigation for the better part of two years that parents have been denied access to this information,” said Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath.
Why was the release of A-F scores delayed?
During a news conference Wednesday at the Rotary Club of Dallas, Morath said the Texas Education Agency provides A-F scores to give parents a simple way of seeing how their kids’ schools are performing, and make more informed decisions about where to send their children to school.
But parents haven’t had access to updated ratings since 2022. TEA was scheduled to release 2023 A-F scores about a year and a half ago. But 120 school districts, including the Fort Worth, Dallas, Arlington and Crowley independent school districts, sued the agency seeking to block the release.
At issue was a proposal by TEA to update its scoring methodology as a part of a “refresh” required by state law. Just before the 2023 ratings were scheduled to be released, the agency announced there would be “further re-examination of the baseline data used in the calculation of progress” — that is, the agency would apply its new scoring methodology to previous years’ scores, giving a clearer picture of whether schools were making progress.
In the suit, districts argued that TEA “cannot change the goalposts on school districts by creating new measures, methods, and procedures throughout the school year and then decide to apply them retroactively.” In October 2023, a Travis County judge blocked the agency from releasing the scores while the lawsuit was pending. Earlier this month, Texas’ 15th Court of Appeals overturned the injunction, ruling the agency could go forward with the release.
Unrelated to the 2023 lawsuit, another court order barred TEA from releasing A-F scores from 2024 in response to a separate suit from a smaller group of school districts. But that injunction didn’t preclude districts from calculating and releasing their own A-F scores based on the agency’s scoring methodology. Several districts, including Fort Worth ISD, did so. The Fort Worth ISD score for 2024, calculated by district officials and confirmed with TEA, was a 70, giving the district a C rating.
Although some districts, such as Fort Worth ISD, released self-calculated scores for 2023 and 2024, other districts in Texas did not. TEA’s release of the statewide data paints a clearer picture for all Texas districts, said Miguel Solis, president of Dallas-based nonprofit Commit Partnership. The A-F accountability scores not only help districts make strategic decisions about resource allocation, but they inform lawmakers drafting education legislation and advise parents about the state of their child’s school.
“Accountability is important, frankly, because all stakeholders in the public education system benefit when we have a transparent, reliable comparison between schools and then also school districts,” Solis said.
Solis noted the 2023 release also disrupts the trend of having incomplete school ratings for the past five years. The scores were paused in 2020 and 2021 because of COVID-19, schools that would have been rated as a D or F were unrated in 2022, and lawsuits halted the release of the 2023 and 2024 grades.
“All of this means that a kindergartner entering a Texas elementary school in 2019 could now be set to finish fifth grade with the campus never having received a letter grade, and possibly missing out on interventions that would have been helpful to ultimately improve the results for those students,” Solis said. “Not having that picture has been to the detriment, ultimately, of improving student outcomes.”
Commit Partnership found more than 60 school systems and more than 900 campuses improved their letter grade from 2022 to 2023, Solis said. As an example, he pointed to Della Icenhower Intermediate school in Mansfield ISD, which improved from a C to a B from 2022 to 2023. The campus has continued to boost its percentage of students meeting grade level standards into 2024 amid an above-average rate of economically disadvantaged students.
“That’s helpful to know, and it would be helpful for systems to take a look at those data to see what may have been happening back then, even if it is a couple of years removed,” he said.
How are districts and campuses rated?
The 2023 A-F scores, with the refresh, are calculated using three categories: student achievement, school progress and closing the gaps. Student performance on STAAR, or the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, has a major role in how each of these categories are analyzed.
In a description of the 2023 updates, TEA lists five bullet points describing what’s different compared to 2022:
Each campus’ rating, based on enrollment of grades 3-12, will be weighted when calculating district ratings.
Standards for college, career and military readiness and graduation rates were increased in the student achievement category.
“A new look” at year-to-year changes includes growth of more students and “includes learning acceleration” in the student progress category.
More students are included in the closing the gaps category and “scoring now focuses on the student groups most in need.”
“If a school has <70 in 3 out of the 4 areas, the highest overall they can receive is a 69.”
Education Commissioner defends “refresh”
During a webinar with journalists Tuesday, April 22, Morath said the two-year-old scores are of limited use to families who are trying to figure out how their children’s school is faring academically. Ideally, the agency would have released the scores in the fall of 2023, giving families access to the most up-to-date data available, he said. He encouraged parents to pay attention to the incoming 2025 accountability grades set to be released in August.
Morath noted that school districts still had access to the raw data amid the lawsuits and had the option to release self-calculated scores at their discretion. He defended the agency’s 2023 update of the A-F system and said it was rolled out “based upon huge amounts of feedback” from parents, teachers, administrators and the public.
“Early versions of the updated A-F system were outlined in June of 2022. That was a year and a half before ratings were issued. There were detailed discussions with superintendents and with specialists inside of schools that focus on accountability, all during the summer of 2022 where various cut points were debated. Changes to methodologies were debated. Then a preliminary design framework for this system was published in November of 2022,” Morath explained.
After the cut points, or the scores that correspond to each letter grade, were published in January 2023, the TEA then went through the formal rulemaking process for the new accountability system in spring 2023 and finished this process by the time accountability scores were set to be released.
Performance of Texas schools overall did decline from 2022 to 2023, he said, but Morath attributed it to a decrease in academic performance. He said there were more than 1,000 campuses, though, that defied this trend and pointed to them as examples of success that other campuses statewide could learn from. He explained a caveat in impacts to elementary and middle schools, which achieved a higher percentage of A scores with the new system, and high schools, which were subject to higher standards for graduation and College, Career and Military Readiness benchmarks.
“Campus performance between ‘22 and ‘23 declined. It did decline. But that is not inherently under the refresh, that’s actually because growth, academic growth for students, was way down,” Morath said.
“Based upon feedback that we’d gotten for the prior five years, there was a more accurate way of assessing how well schools close the gaps between students and how well they’re accelerating students, basically catching students up to grade. So when we refined our way of evaluating campuses based upon that feedback, it recognized … sort of higher levels of performance than was previously recognized,” Morath added.
This story was originally published April 24, 2025 at 9:18 AM.
