New Report: How Can Texas Empower Families to Make Informed School Choices?

When it comes to education, North Texans are blessed with an increasing array of school choices.

Our traditional public school districts are innovating with new school models and open-enrollment policies. There are more than 130 charter campuses operating within Dallas County alone. And we have numerous private school options, many with a long history in the community.

We are also fortunate to have a great deal of data, which parents can use to make an informed choice among their many public education options. Texas is a national leader in transparency, and each year our state agencies release significant amounts of data related to student outcomes, a great portion of which Commit seeks to “democratize” through easy-to-access dashboards.

But if we’re unable to clearly communicate the insights behind the numbers, we risk becoming “data rich but information poor.” While Commit presents this data to the public via interactive dashboards that one can explore at commitdata.org, we can’t hope to reach the whole state on our own nor replace the state’s critical role in evaluating performance and designing appropriate interventions where needed.

In 2017, our state lawmakers amended our accountability system to include the communication of easy-to-understand A–F letter grades to all of Texas’ roughly 1,200 public school districts and charter networks and their approximate 9,000 campuses. Creating a system that fairly and reliably compares this extraordinary range of educational options is complex by necessity, and our Texas policymakers wisely recognized the ongoing need to continuously improve the system via periodic refreshes of the desired standards.

However, since 2017, full A–F ratings have only been awarded once, in the year immediately following the bill’s passage. The disruption of the pandemic, followed by a series of lawsuits initiated by select districts, have deprived Texas parents and guardians of actionable information ever since. Worse, students remain on failing campuses that otherwise could have received greater resources and interventions had the system still been working as intended. Read the School Choice Report.

At Commit we want to be very clear: These letter grades should not be used to shame our hardworking educators and school leaders. As W. Edwards Deming once said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” An underperforming school is the result of an underperforming system, not any one failing individual, and likely can be attributed to a host of factors ranging from curriculum to teacher training to poorly aligned systemic incentives to governance to funding.

Still, we can’t hope to improve our education system if we aren’t clear-eyed about where outcomes are lacking and if we aren’t willing to dedicate the strategic resources necessary — including talented people and funding — toward the specific areas that we need to improve. And should any other group of educational institutions eventually become eligible to receive public state funding to educate children in the PK–12 space, transparency on their results and accountability for positive outcomes should follow those dollars as well.

Without these letter grades, we also lose the ability to celebrate the schools and systems that see remarkable improvement and sustained success. So I want to end by applauding the many districts across Texas, including Dallas, DeSoto, Duncanville, Garland, Irving and Uplift here in Dallas County, that choose to voluntarily release what their letter grades would have been. By prioritizing clarity and trust within their school communities, they are providing an example to the state.

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-Todd Williams

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