INSIDER
The Senate’s rewrite of House Bill 4 reflects a gap in what the chambers want to see out of the new state assessment and the performance ratings that largely hinge on its results.
The Texas Education Agency released the 2022-23 school year ratings on Thursday after a 19-month legal battle over how those ratings are calculated.
Failing grades for districts were made public for the first time since 2019. They showed schools with the poorest students were more likely to get a low score.
School leaders have privately criticized a bill that would make it harder to contest their performance ratings in court. But they did not testify against it to avoid lawmakers’ ire.
Dozens of districts sued Texas saying the ratings painted an unfair picture of their schools. Others voluntarily have released their own.
The superintendents said they haven’t received enough support from the state or time to fix errors the system generated.
The Texas Education Agency says there’s time to fix problems before officially reported data is used to determine how much money districts get.
Texas families have not received a full picture of their schools’ ratings since 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and lawsuits blocking their release.
Lawmakers at a Texas Tribune Fest panel found common ground on school funding and teacher pay but took starkly different stances on “school choice.”
Test results have gone up since the pandemic in both subjects, but math scores are still below 2019 levels and about half of Texas students read below the level appropriate for most children in their grade.
Texas’ education agency first moved to take over the district in 2019 after years of low student performance at a single Houston ISD high school. Critics said the district has made improvements since then.
Rural school leaders in Texas have been able to stave off the legislative priority of some of the state’s most prominent Republicans. But private school officials hope this year will be different.
