(Seguin) – The Seguin ISD is now one of 250 Texas school districts and education organizations who are asking the Texas Education Agency to pause its planned “refresh” of the A-F Accountability System that would “retroactively increase the bar for College, Career and Military Readiness by 47 percent. The CCMR is one of the elements that helps to determine a school or district’s overall rating.
Together the school districts submitted a letter to the state including to Texas Governor Greg Abbot.
Although the attempts by the state are said to help “refocus on goals that directly address post-pandemic student needs” and to “allow Texas to leverage lessons learned over the last five years to improve the rigor, transparency, and fairness of the accountability system,” these districts are concerned that their attempts will also be at the same time as another change and that’s the redesign of the STAAR exam.
The TEA proposes to raise the cut score necessary for a high school to receive an “A” in the CCMR domain from a 60 to an 88, a nearly 47 percent increase in one year and apply this increased cut score to students who graduated in 2022.
According to materials published by the TEA, the newly proposed cut score was set for two primary reasons: 1) too many schools are performing above the 60-point threshold; and 2) 68 percent of students who are deemed college, career, or military ready, sustain postsecondary success one year after graduation.
The TEA states that one of the goals of the A-F Accountability System as a whole “is to ensure that no forced distribution exists and that all schools have the opportunity to achieve an A rating.” As a result, the districts state that “it is perplexing that the TEA would use the justification that too many schools are receiving an A for CCMR to raise the cut score.”
In their letter to the state, the district’s state, “these significant changes to the cut score for CCMR will have drastic impacts to school ratings across Texas. The A-F system was designed to make it easier for the public to understand how schools are truly performing. But increasing the cut score for an A for CCMR by almost 47 percent in a single year will create the misconception that high performing schools are drastically declining, even if their CCMR performance actually improved. In the midst of a teacher shortage, the last thing school districts need is another false narrative that drives a wedge between schools and the families they serve.”
The Seguin ISD and the Schertz-Cibolo- Universal City ISD are the only two districts in Guadalupe County to be part of this list of districts who again are asking that the legislature intervene and ensure that the elected representatives of the people evaluate the accountability system holistically to improve how district’s measure success and communicate school performance to their families. Click here to read the full letter as submitted by the districts to the state of Texas.