AUSTIN – The Texas Education Agency (TEA) today released the final 2018 state academic accountability ratings for 1,200 school districts and charters and more than 8,700 campuses. The final ratings include the results of an appeals process that provides districts and charters an opportunity to contest preliminary ratings.

Preliminary state accountability ratings were announced by TEA in August. The Texas Education Code requires the commissioner of education to provide a process for districts and charters to challenge their accountability ratings. School district appeals are first carefully reviewed by an independent appeals panel before being sent to the commissioner for a final decision.

The Texas Education Agency received 172 school district and campus-level appeals in 2018, compared to 66 in 2017, 104 in 2016, and 72 in 2015. 

Three of 46 district appeals were granted by the commissioner. The Closing the Gaps domain rating for Freer ISD was changed from an F to a C. The School Progress domain rating for Lyford ISD was changed from a B to an A. The School Progress domain rating for Snook ISD was changed from a D to a C. Final school district ratings (including charter operators) by category in 2018 are as follows: 

* Single-campus districts received either a Met Standard or Improvement Required rating for 2018 to align with the campus rating.

Twelve of 126 campus appeals were granted by the commissioner. The campus appeals granted in 2018 are as follows: 

* The campus had an appeal granted that did not affect its overall rating.

Under the final 2018 state accountability system, campus ratings (including charter campuses) by category and school type are as follows:

Parents are encouraged to visit TXschools.org to view online report cards designed to be useful tools in seeing how a school or school district is doing in different areas. The report cards spotlight specific strengths, in addition to any challenges, that can assure the needs of all students are being met. Parents can search by district or school name and compare that district’s or school’s performance to others in their area.

Districts and campuses receive a rating based on performance in three areas:

• Student Achievement measures what students know and can do by the end of the year. It includes results from state assessments across all subjects for all students, on both general and alternate assessments, College, Career, and Military Readiness (CCMR) indicators (such as AP/IB, SAT and ACT results), and graduation rates.
• School Progress measures how much better students are doing on the STAAR test 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.

Seventy percent of the accountability rating is based on the better of Student Achievement or School Progress (whichever is better is the only performance measure counted). The remaining 30 percent is based on performance in the Closing the Gaps area. To learn more about the A–F accountability system, visit https://tea.texas.gov/A-F.

While district ratings are based on an A–F scale, the 2018 rating labels for individual campuses continued under the Met Standard, Met Alternative Standard or Improvement Required labels. The A–F rating labels will be applied to campuses beginning in August 2019.

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