More North Texas school districts are joining in on the statewide fight to protest changes to the way the Texas Education Agency grades campuses. Fort Worth and Plano ISD joined the lengthy list Tuesday night.
Hours earlier, the head of the Texas Education Agency (TEA) served as the keynote speaker of the Dallas Regional Chamber's 2023 State of Public Education conference. His visit came at a time when nearly 60 school districts are suing him regarding the new accountability ratings.
Mike Morath, a former Dallas ISD trustee who was appointed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in 2015 to become the commissioner of the Texas Education Agency (TEA), said while student learning has improved since the pandemic, there's still more work to do.
"It is our moral obligation to give children the best chance they can to be successful in this country to make sure the next generation of Texans has it better than the last," said Morath.
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He talked about career readiness, improving the curriculum to make it more rigorous, teacher conditions, pay, and reporting school performance.
"It's hard work, nothing about this is easy, but it's the most important work that we do and we've got to do it right, and it starts with high expectations and starts with being honest with ourselves about performance," said Morath to a room full of business leaders and educators.
He briefly spoke about the scores that are given out to schools to grade their performance but didn't mention the pending litigation regarding the hot topic.
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"We engage in continuous improvement, we publicly report the A-F scores of our campuses, and as it turns out this is a good idea. It has been studied methodically by researchers and publicly reporting accountability scores and having high expectations in that accountability systems causes children to earn more money when they're in their 20s," said Morath.
District leaders don't disagree that they should be held to a high standard, but many are protesting the new changes stating they were not given enough notice about them.
Nearly five dozen districts are suing TEA. The lawsuit claims the new accountability ratings will negatively drop their district's scores. TEA raised the benchmark of achievement in January, but some school leaders have equated it to moving a goalpost while a game is already in play.
"None of us are saying high standards are not something we should continue to work towards, we are saying we should do that in a way that allows us to meet that target and be successful. Giving someone a test when you know they’re not prepared for it, serves what purpose?” Stephanie Elizalde, Ph.D., superintendent of Dallas ISD to reporters after the event.
She along with Plano ISD Superintendent Theresa Williams, Ph.D., and Cedar Hill ISD, Gerald Hudson, Ph.D., spoke on a panel after Morath.
The commissioner left moments after the panel took the stage, but Williams and Elizalde expressed their thoughts publicly.
"Our student academic achievement improved. So our students performed better, but our grades declined. I can explain it, I can put up the numbers, but I can’t make it make sense," said Elizalde during the panel discussion. "I think it's important something the commissioner said about 'A-F' being an indicator of how our schools are doing and I would ask all of us including the commissioner to please ask ourselves, do the grades correlate to student improvement or are they contradicting student performance?"
In a recent interview with NBC 5, Elizalde said Dallas ISD's State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness,(STARR) test scores have improved but based on the new TEA grading scale, 42 DISD campuses would drop in their ratings.
"We just saw a presentation of our commissioner tout the success of DISD, and yet our letter grade would go from a 'B' to a 'C', how would I make that make sense when you heard from our very commissioner that we've had improvements," said Elizalde on Tuesday after the event.
She was referring to Morath's presentation on Tuesday, giving DISD compliments for teaching a rigorous curriculum, something the district said it's been working on.
"Dallas is leading the way. If you walk into a second-grade classroom in Dallas ISD you will see them debating the war of 1812," said Morath who also complimented the district on teaching Shakespeare to 5th graders.
While Elizalde said she has to give credit to Commissioner Morath for taking the time to hold virtual meetings and speak with superintendents, she said she has a responsibility to reflect what the DISD community wants.
"We all know parents do now look at these letter grades when they're choosing where to live, so this could have an impact on property values, it could have an impact on student enrollment, anytime you talk about student enrollment you’re talking about dollars because the dollars follow our students. and here we can talk about the loss of finances, decreases in property values, and of course more difficulty with an already strained workforce of educators," said Elizalde.
The superintendent for Plano ISD said students have had 'incredible' growth since the pandemic and are either back to where they were or have exceeded results.
Williams said the other story is about teacher working conditions as they continue to ensure students are what they need while dealing with "unfunded mandates" from the state.
"One thing that is a little bothersome to the second part of this story is that you see the growth, you see the improvement then and all of a sudden we’re going to relabel something, doesn’t seem like rigor, but to me, and just not to me but o our teachers, because we hear from them, it's demoralizing. And so when we think about what’s coming to us as far as A-F system, we need to take that into account," said Williams who also emphasized they welcome accountability and rigor.
Later on Tuesday night, the Plano ISD school board voted to join in on the lawsuit against TEA.
Fort Worth also added their name to the list.
"The state said we're going to change the accountability system but we're not going to tell you what it is, and we're not going to tell you after the school year. We want to improve but we need to know what the goalposts are," said Fort Worth Superintendent, Angelica Ramsey, Ph.D.
The new rankings were supposed to be released next week, but it may be sometime in October.
Morath wasn't available after the event to speak, but he spoke with NBC 5 earlier this summer about the new grading system and he insisted superintendents supported the idea of bigger changes every five years rather than small yearly ones.
"Let's do all the changes at one time, then you have one year where you have this 'what if' concept, where you communicate about and then otherwise everybody can still compare your performance pretty effectively," said Morath in the previous interview.
But district leaders said that’s not true, and under no circumstance should A schools become C schools and C schools now be labeled failing with no drop in performance.
Elizalde is under the belief that the timing of all the changes is 'intentional' referencing proposed laws that would allow parents to take tax dollars to private schools if the public school is failing.
"It is at least very least disappointing that it appears all of these have been set up on a timeline leading up to a special session that may be discussing private school subsidies," said the Dallas ISD Superintendent.
Tuesday evening, Abbott said he will call a special session in October about "school of choice" in other words school vouchers.
According to a news release from the governor's office, during a tele-town hall with faith leaders in Texas on Tuesday, Abbott encouraged people to, "participate in School Choice Sunday" on Oct. 15.
