Kingsville ISD calls for delay to school accountability system refresh

Kingsville ISD is among several Texas school districts that have filed a lawsuit against Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath in response to changes to the school accountability rating system.

The Texas Education Agency is expected to release updated A-F performance ratings for every public school district in the state in September, reflecting school progress over the 2022-23 school year. After a redesign of the system, many districts are bracing for lower ratings.

“We truly believe in accountability,” Kingsville ISD Superintendent Cissy Reynolds-Perez said. “All schools and all districts should be held accountable.”

But, she said, school districts should be fully informed of increased rigor and changing standards ahead of time so that they can prepare and do everything possible to meet state expectations for student progress.

According to a petition filed last week by KISD, along with Canutillo ISD, Crowley ISD, Del Valle ISD, Edinburg Consolidated ISD, Fort Stockton ISD and Pecos-Barstow ISD, the new measures and procedures the state is using to calculate the 2023-23 ratings were not provided to schools at the beginning of the school year.

Additionally, the petition cites an Aug. 15 deadline for the public release of performance ratings as outlined by the Texas Education Code. That deadline has passed.

“The Commissioner 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 a manner that will artificially and arbitrarily lower school districts’ performance ratings,” the petition reads.

The Texas Education Agency declined to comment in response to an inquiry from the Caller-Times, citing ongoing legal matters.

Earlier this month during a back-to-school visit to Gregory-Portland ISD days before the petition was filed, Morath spoke briefly with the Caller-Times on the subject of accountability ratings.

“For the last five years, ratings have been based on the same methodology,” Morath said. “This year, we are tweaking the methodology of the rating system, so when ratings come out at the end of September, a family comparing this year’s ratings to last year’s ratings is not going to be apples-to-apples.”

Morath said that along with the 2022-23 ratings, the state will also release “what-if” ratings for the 2021-22 school year based on the new methodology. Morath said that schools have been aware that a refresh was coming this year since 2017 and that the TEA began conversations with educators across the state about the changes in the summer of 2022 and shared cut point criteria in January.

Reynolds-Perez said that her district was the first to initiate legal action, concerned about what impact a low rating might have on the community.

“If people leave because they see a letter grade that’s not an accurate narrative of what has occurred, you lose enrollment,” Reynolds-Perez said.

School funding is based on the number of students a school serves.

Reynolds-Perez said that her concerns began growing this spring when she and other superintendents were told by the TEA during a webinar that a campus might improve between 2022 and 2023 but receive a lower rating, potentially dropping a letter grade.

“This information was shared with us in the spring,” Reynolds-Perez said. “That’s after halfway through the year.”

The ratings are based heavily on State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness results, but also take into account graduation rates and college, career and military readiness factors. The A-F system was established in 2017, but ratings were not released for the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years due to the pandemic.

This year, the state is raising standards and cut points, including raising the threshold for an A rating so that schools must show 88% of graduates are career and college ready. Previously, the threshold for an A rating was 60%. These criteria will be used to assess 2022 graduates.

The state also introduced an updated STAAR test in 2023.

In March, 250 Texas school districts and education organizations signed onto an open letter to Gov. Greg Abbott, Morath, Senate Education Committee Chairman Brandon Creighton and House Public Education Committee Chairman Brad Buckley expressing concern about the college, career and military readiness changes.

“Districts no longer have any influence over the performance of those students, and it is unreasonable to apply new standards retroactively, particularly because these students will not benefit from the ‘improve(d) rigor, transparency, and fairness (of) the accountability system’,” the letter reads.

In May, 55 members of the Texas House of Representatives signed a letter to the commissioner expressing concern about “dramatic, retroactive” changes to the cut scores.

“We’re not getting any response from the superintendents sending a letter,” Reynolds-Perez said. “We didn’t get a response from the legislators sending a letter. Our own legislator (J.M. Lozano) sent a letter – nothing.”

Reynolds-Perez said KISD felt that the only recourse left was to file a petition asking for a hold harmless year so that the new measures are not applied retroactively to the 2022-23 school year.

Kingsville ISD is intimately familiar with the impact that a failing school accountability rating can have on a community. Before Reynolds-Perez joined the district, Kingsville ISD earned an F rating in 2017-18.

“I saw how painful that can be for our community,” Reynolds-Perez said. “It lowers the students and teachers’ self-esteem. It lowers the possibility of businesses coming to your community.”

The district was able to improve to a C in 2018-2019, progress it maintained in 2021-22, improving slightly from a 76 to a 78 over the course of several ungraded pandemic years.

Reynolds-Perez was concerned about how the community might react to a potentially lower grade that might not reflect the growth and progress the district has experienced.

“Unless you’re really entrenched in the work of public education, you really don’t know because it’s so complicated,” Reynolds-Perez said.

The Kingsville ISD Board of Trustees agreed to pursue a lawsuit and other districts reached out to join, Reynolds-Perez said.

“My board and I happen to be at a point where we’ve seen what has occurred here in the past and we know all the hard work that everybody has been doing – all of students and all of our staff – to improve,” Reynolds-Perez said. “To know that our STAAR scores are improving, yet this new rating system would make changes to drop us – it's just something we felt like we needed to be able to speak up about on behalf of our students and our teachers and our community.”

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This article originally appeared on Corpus Christi Caller Times: Kingsville ISD, districts file lawsuit against TEA commissioner