It’s not often that a Texas public school superintendent calls a press conference to deliver bad news about his district’s accountability ratings before the state does that for him. Especially when it may be months before the official numbers are released and become unavoidable.
Might even be a first. But in any case, Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles got tired of waiting for much-delayed official school ratings from the Texas Education Agency and instead had his administration’s number crunchers and analysts — using methodology and raw data provided to it by TEA — come up with their own accountability ratings.
The results were worse than expected, he said Tuesday.
Miles had been predicting for a while that he expected about 80 HISD schools to be rated D or F for the 2022-23 school year after TEA decided to up the ante on what it takes to meet standards, let alone be an A-rated campus.
But now HISD believes a whopping 111 of its schools will fall into the D or F category. Specifically, 52 F-rated campuses and 59 D-rated. This amounts to 41 percent of the district’s schools.
“The fact that it’s 111, that was not expected, that high a number,” Miles said.
Another 64 schools will receive a C rating, 58 will be blessed with a B and only 35 will be anointed with an A, if HISD calculations are correct. Ratings are based on student achievement, school progress and closing the achievement gap between various groups of students.
“We have a lot of work to do I guess is the main message,” Miles said. “We have a lot of schools that are struggling.” The ratings are from the data in Spring 2023 when the STAAR (State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness) tests were given.
Miles did not release which schools got which grade. Dr. Allison Matney, executive director of assessment, accountability and compliance for HISD and her office ran the numbers and came up with their assessments.
A cynic might say that these spectacularly lower-than-even-expected results being released before the official numbers are handed out by TEA is a strategic move by Miles, in the face of some general criticism of his methods, to bolster more support for his approach to overhauling education in HISD.
But Miles, as usual indicating the urgency of corrective action and repeating his mantra that “We can’t continue to do the things we’ve always done,” said data from other national tests supports HISD’s assessment of what the new statewide ratings will be. Citing a range of other assessments, Miles said: “All point to the same thing. Our proficiency is low. The gap hasn’t changed in 25 years.”
“Does this confirm what we’ve known already? Yes, it’s a confirmation.”
As it turns out, of the 52 F-rated schools, 31 are already in Miles’ New Education System or NES-Aligned programs. Another 16 schools are F who are not NES, he said.
Saying that there are 45 D and F schools that are not NES or NESA, Miles said his administration is working through the best approach to take with those schools.
“I suspect that some of them will be new NES schools.”
Chief Education Officer Kristen Hole said HISD plans to release by February the names of schools that will become NES campuses in the 2024-2025 school year. That information will get out in time for families making their school choice applications and decisions for the next school year, she said..
Asked again why the district hadn’t joined with more than 100 other school districts to sue TEA over its new more rigorous accountability process, Miles repeated that his focus in on making needed academic improvements here.
The districts suing argue that TEA making such extreme changes in its ratings methodology, is simply unfair and will lead to a severe drop in school ratings, doing harm to the districts, particularly those like Houston — that have many low-income students.
A Travis County judge has blocked the TEA from releasing the ratings and set a trial date for February 12.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
