TRI-COUNTY — School accountability ratings from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) for the 2022-23 school year were finally released late last month, resulting in an overall increase of D and F ratings across the state. While it is nuanced, Big Bend area districts generally either maintained their ratings or saw lower scores.
The ratings were delayed due to a lawsuit between the TEA and over 100 school districts across the state, who opposed changes to the A-F accountability rating system announced in 2023. Another similar ongoing lawsuit is preventing the release of 2023-24 ratings. This school year’s ratings, for 2024-25, are scheduled to be released in August.
The ratings are largely driven by State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) test scores and also take into account College Career and Military Readiness (CCMR) and graduation rates for older students.
The A-F accountability system was established in 2017, but scheduled ratings have been irregular for the past five years due to lawsuits and the COVID-19 pandemic. The last ratings to be released were for the 2021-22 school year. In order to provide an “apples to apples” comparison in light of accountability system adjustments, the TEA provided districts with a “What If” score for the 2021-22 school year, which applies the same standards as the newly-revamped 2022-23 rating system.
A quick look at the districts across the Big Bend region reveals how varied results can be.
Alpine, Marfa and Valentine school districts saw rating declines compared to both their actual 2021-22 ratings and their What If ratings. Presidio and San Vicente school districts saw no changes, maintaining B and A ratings respectively across the board.
Fort Davis ISD received a B rating for 2022-23, the same as their 2021-22 rating, but received a C What If rating. Terlingua CSD received a D rating, down from a 2021-22 C rating, but remained stagnant if considering their D What If rating. Marathon ISD, interestingly, received a B rating, down from a 2021-22 A rating, with a D What If rating.
Alpine ISD received a C rating, down from a 2021-22 B rating, as well as a B What If rating; Marfa ISD received a D rating, down from a 2021-22 B rating, or C What If rating. Districts with higher percentages of low income students — 52.3% for Alpine ISD and 48.5% for Marfa ISD — were more likely to receive a D or F rating compared to wealthier school districts.
While conservative leaders, and Commissioner of Education Mike Morath, have argued that the A-F rating system gives parents a clear view of school performance, its opponents often counter that ratings are politically motivated, a way to undermine public education to pass school vouchers and overemphasize the STAAR test, which reflects student performance on one day of the year. Alpine ISD Superintendent Michelle Rinehart said her district’s ratings were down like many across the state, with some education leaders — including those involved in the lawsuits — arguing it was unfair for the TEA to retroactively change scoring after the year had concluded.
“A quarter of all districts in Texas were moved from B ratings down to C, D, F ratings overnight, despite many of those districts actually doing better on the STAAR tests,” Rinehart said. “This seems to be a state initiative to label more districts as failing, even if they’ve actually improved their performance from the year before.”
Alpine middle and high schools received a B rating while Alpine Elementary received an F rating. Marfa ISD, while it maintains two campuses, was evaluated as a singular K-12 school.
Alpine High School (AHS) dropped four percentage points in the new ratings due to CCMR evaluation changes, Rinehart said, which required a significant increase in the number of students meeting CCMR criteria for the school to receive an A rating. “That bar was moved from 60% of students obtaining CCMR points to be an A up to [88%] in one year. That’s where the decrease on the AHS side of things came from,” she said.
The Alpine Elementary rating is based solely on STAAR test results for third- and fourth-graders — younger students do not take the test — and, in some categories, only fourth-graders are evaluated, meaning that the entire school’s accountability rating relies on those two grade levels.
Even with those caveats, Rinehart said the district’s goal moving forward is clear. “We want each of our campuses to be an A-rated campus, and we want to be an A-rated district,” she said.
She said for the past two years the district has been working to improve its STAAR scores and is “heading in the right direction.” Since the 2022-23 school year the district has adopted a coherent K-5 curriculum, which was previously lacking, Rinehart said, that has improved student outcomes.
2022-23 ratings also reflected major changes to the STAAR test, including all tests moving online and the addition of an essay component for third through high school grades that accounts for 20% of their total Reading Language Arts (RLA) scores. Rinehart said Alpine ISD saw lower scores due to the new essay component, and teachers have since been working to better prepare students for those prompts.
“What are the strategies we can teach our kids so that when they see that big blank box on an essay question they have a really strong strategy — whether they’re in high school or third grade — about how to craft a well-thought-out essay response as part of that online test,” Rinehart said.
Alpine ISD is also focusing on student growth, she said, a metric that compares student STAAR scores year after year that informs both TEA accountability ratings and the Teacher Incentive Allotment program — an initiative to provide raises to teachers who prove merit through a test score-based system. A tri-district initiative between Marfa, Alpine and Marathon ISDs to expand Career Technical Education (CTE) opportunities for high school students, which will launch next year, should also help raise CCMR scores for all participating districts.
Marfa ISD Interim Superintendent Arturo Alferez said his district is also working to improve CCMR outcomes — trying to ramp up the number of students participating in dual credit courses and earning associate degrees. He said the district’s goal is to have every eligible student enrolled in a career technical course. Marfa ISD currently only offers welding, but may soon have access to Alpine ISD’s certified nursing assistant program or other opportunities through the CTE partnership.
He said Marfa ISD teachers recently underwent training from the Region 18 Education Service Center relating to accountability and student academic growth and are focusing on improving STAAR scores in math and reading. “Moving forward, we know what the rating criteria is, now let’s focus on getting students from approaching [grade level], to a master’s [grade level] and meets grade level,” Alferez said.
This year, Marfa ISD received a $140,000 Strong Foundations Planning Grant from the state to improve its math curriculum. Next year, the district will receive a $400,000 implementation grant from the same program.
Alferez said he is encouraging Marfa teachers to focus on the 2021-22 What If score of a C, rather than the 2021-22 actual score of a B, because it better reflects the new metrics TEA is using that generated the 2022-23 D rating.
“I wish we would have gone to C, versus the B, because when talking to the staff that is alarming when you drop two grade levels,” Alferez said. “Like I told our staff, these ratings are two years old. We can’t go back and try to adjust to what happened two years ago, the only thing we can do is be proactive as to where we want to improve.”
While there are several bills currently moving through the Texas Legislature that propose further changes to the education accountability rating system, Rinehart said Alpine ISD remains primarily focused on funding inequities. While school vouchers have become law, a school funding bill “hasn’t come anywhere near the governor’s desk,” she said.
“The intricacies of what the solutions look like for the accountability system legislation, we’re open to those,” Rinehart said. “But we think it’s short-sighted for a legislator to just be focused on those parts of the system without also looking at: how are we going to adequately fund public schools, particularly rural public schools, so that they’re equipped to make the kind of gains that we want in our communities?”
TEA Accountability Ratings and more data for each school district is available online at TXSchools.gov.