The Texas Education Agency is temporarily blocked from releasing new A-F accountability grades for the state’s public schools.
A coalition of school districts was granted a temporary injunction Thursday by a Travis County court, securing at least a brief win in their lawsuit against Education Commissioner Mike Morath.
Dallas ISD — and several other districts — sued Morath to stop him from implementing new standards for this year’s set of grades. They argued he was “retroactively changing the rules in a way that will arbitrarily lower performance ratings for many school districts and campuses even though their performance improved.”
The Texas Education Agency plans to immediately appeal the decision.
“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,” an agency statement read.
Morath has previously said the changes to the system are part of a five-year cycle. Updates are needed, he said, to ensure schools are continuously working to improve outcomes for students and position Texas as a national education leader.
Texas’ A-F school accountability system evaluates every district across the state, giving families a sense of how their local campuses are performing. The ratings are a big factor in how communities perceive their local schools. The scores can influence where people buy homes — and whether they decide to enroll in the public school system in the first place.
The grades are largely based on standardized test scores, factoring in how well a school grows academic achievement and closes gaps between student groups. The formula has remained mainly static since lawmakers created it in 2017, but big changes were to be factored in when the Texas Education Agency released the latest round of scores.
It would have been more difficult to score well in the metric that assesses how prepared graduates are for college, career or the military. Changes would have also impacted other data points, including by weighing scores differently based on campus size.
The lawsuit alleged that Morath didn’t provide districts with enough notice about what measures, methods and procedures apply to their next set of scores.
“School districts cannot take steps during the school year to ensure that they are taking steps to achieve high performance rating” without that information, the lawsuit stated.
Dallas ISD Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde said DISD could see the largest number of D and F ratings in the district’s history if the of the revised formula was implemented.
“Dallas ISD has always prided itself on holding ourselves accountable,” Elizalde said during a September board meeting. “That being said, we also think that when we are evaluating students or teachers or any members of our team, that they should always know what exactly they’re being evaluated on, prior to the completion or conclusion of their evaluation.”
