Receives Distinction in Post-Secondary Readiness
By Becky Brewster
In August, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) released the long-anticipated and much-dreaded A-F District Accountability Ratings for Multi-Campus School Districts. Single-Campus Districts, such as CCAISD, did not receive letter grades, but will be subject to the new A-F ratings for the 2018-2019 school year. These Districts and individual campuses will be ranked according to whether or not they “Met Standard,” “Met Alternative Standard,” or “Improvement Required.”
CCAISD “Met Standards” in all three performance areas as well as receiving a Distinction in Post-Secondary Readiness. The District scored 68 out of 100 points to meet the required standards.
The following tables show the ratings for CCAISD and a sampling of other single-district campuses and multi-district campuses in the region.
Single-campus school districts, for 2018, received one of three ratings – Met Standard, Met Alternative Standard or Improvement Required, according to the TEA website. But the state did release numeric scores for single-campus district schools, which can be easily translated to grades. CCAISD will be rated using the A-F system beginning in August 2019. (Source: Texas Education Agency, www.txschools.org)
According to TEA, under the A-F scale, districts receive a grade based on performance in three areas:
- Student Achievement measures what students know and can do by the end of the year using results from state assessments across all subjects for all students, College/Career/Military Readiness (CCMR) indicators, and graduation rates.
- School Progress measures how much better students are doing on the STAAR tests this year versus last year, and how much better students are doing academically relative to schools with similar percentages of economically disadvantaged students.
- Closing the Gaps looks at performance among student groups, including various racial/ethnic groups, socioeconomic backgrounds and other factors.
Districts seem to be struggling the most with the “Closing the Gaps” measurement as it is consistently the lowest score for each District depicted. [*Valentine ISD was not rated on this indicator.] The measurement for “Closing the Gap” has a convoluted means of arriving at the score taking into account such factors as the percentage of economically disadvantaged students, students receiving special education services, seven racial/ethnic groups, and English language learners.
Although these scores reflect district ratings, they do not reflect the grades for the individual campuses in the multi-campus districts. Alpine ISD received an overall rating of “B” while Alpine Elementary was ranked as a “F.” Wink-Loving ISD received an overall rating of “F” while Wink High School scored a “C.”
There is no consensus on what the scores actually mean, although state officials seem to think this new grading system is more transparent than the prior rating system. School personnel around the state are trying to decipher the 86 page 2018 Accountability Manual to figure out where the scores came from and what needs to be done to improve.
In 2016, CCAISD was under an “Improvement Required” Plan due to a change in the Index 3 Target Score of the ranking system that was in place at that time. The District implemented plans to address the deficiencies and was able to bring the District into compliance and showed significant continued improvement for the 2016-2017 school year. This year, however, the criteria has changed so much that it is not feasible to try and compare the scores. CCAISD will be implementing additional new programs such as AVID and Project Lead the Way for 2018-2019 which will help strengthen the District’s scores as it heads to the District A-F Accountability Rating next year.
The 2018 scores will be presented to the CCAISD Board at its September meeting.
