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New Accountability Data Points To Solutions for Students


A legal battle continues to block access to information meant for families and community members to learn how well their districts and campuses are doing. But new underlying data has since been made available at the regional and state levels, providing us with insights on broad trends, if not the individual bright spots we’d normally hope to celebrate and learn from.

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) provides A-F ratings for every Texas campus and school system, based on a variety of student outcomes such as academic proficiency, year-over-year growth and college, career and military readiness. TEA has worked to continuously improve this system since its creation in 2017, most recently with a “refresh” of the methodology meant to more accurately measure how Texas schools are supporting learning and preparing students for postsecondary success.

While we only know the 2024 summative letter grades for districts that have chosen to share them given the ongoing lawsuit, TEA had released underlying data for the state as well as each of the twenty Education Service Center (ESC) regions. Dallas County, as well as Collin, Rockwell and several others in North Texas, are represented by ESC Region 10.

Learning Acceleration

Under the 2024 accountability manual, districts and campuses receive extra credit for accelerating learning for students who did not meet state standards in reading/language arts and/or math in the previous year. This is especially importance as our educators continue to contend with the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact to public education, revealed in a recent downturn in STAAR scores in Dallas County and across the state.

The good news is that many students are experiencing academic growth. In both Region 10 and the state, over a third of students who previously had scored “Did Not Meet” in math are now “Approaching” those grade-level standards in the next grade. Unfortunately, however, the percentage of students whose learning was successfully accelerated decreased from the previous year to the current one.

While math has emerged as the subject in most need of urgent attention post-pandemic, reading/language arts has also proven to be a difficult subject in which to accelerate learning, with fewer overall students growing from Did Not Meets to Approaching state standards as well as an even greater decline in acceleration from ‘23 to ‘24 in both Region 10 and the state.

This data reinforces the need for district and state leadership to continue investing in the strategies that have been proven by research to catch struggling students, especially when we consider that students who meet the “Approaches” level still need additional support before truly meeting grade level standards. Thankfully, high-impact tutoring has seen success around the country and in Ector County ISD as well as Uplift schools, and increasing instructional time through the Additional Days School Year has also shown a great deal of promise in Aldine ISD.

College, Career and Military Readiness

Texas schools are increasing the number of students considered “college, career and military ready” (CCMR) within the accountability system – and North Texas is among the regions leading the way, growing 10 percentage points from the 2023 to 2024 school year compared to 7 points for the state.

Under the state’s accountability system, students are considered college, career and military ready (or CCMR) when they've met one out of a list of potential criteria, including passing the Texas Success Initiative Assessment (or TSIA), earning dual credit, or attaining an industry-based certification (or IBC). While this definition is not as rigorous as the one used in CCMR outcomes-based funding as introduced in House Bill 3 (86R), it has been made more rigorous by the recent A-F refresh mentioned previously, which phased out, or “sunset”, credit for several IBCs that were not aligned to fields in which students could expect to earn a living wage.

By digging deeper into the data, an increase in the amount of students earning IBCs emerges as one driver of the growth seen over the past year. In the previous school year, North Texas school districts increased the percentage of students completing industry-based credentials by eight points, bringing the total percentage in line with the state average of 33%. Importantly, this increase in overall credential attainment comes even as the number of students earning a sunsetting IBC decreased in both in region and the state.

The growth in industry-based certifications offered by our schools, paired with the concurrent reduction in low-quality IBCs phased out by the refresh, reveals how our accountability system ultimately influences the decisions of our school systems to the benefit of students. But other important benchmarks, like the completion of dual credit coursework and meeting standards on the Texas Success Initiative Assessment, remain stagnant. While we await a legal resolution that hopefully increases transparency, these data provide a useful indication of the areas in which we must continue to focus.

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