Judge temporarily blocks Texas Education Agency from releasing A-F accountability ratings again

From Texas Public Radio:

For the second year in a row, Texas school districts asked the courts to intervene over the state’s methods of grading their academic performances.

And, also for a second year in a row, a judge blocked Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath from releasing those grades, known as A-F accountability ratings.

As of Monday, Aug. 12, the order barring the release of A-F ratings is temporary, preventing TEA from releasing the ratings this week as planned. TEA was slated to release official ratings to districts on Tuesday and to the public on Thursday.

Five Texas school districts filed suit in a Travis County District Court on Monday, asking for a hold on releasing the A-F ratings. Judge Karin Crump granted their request, issued a temporary restraining order barring the release until a hearing scheduled for Aug. 26.

Attorneys Nick Maddox and David Campbell with the law firm O’Hanlon, Demerath & Castillo represent the school districts that sued TEA over the accountability ratings both last year and this year.

Last year, the crux of the lawsuit hinged on changes made to the way TEA measured accountability after students the measurements were based on had already graduated. This year, Maddox said the focus of the lawsuit is on the standardized tests much of the accountability ratings are based on.

“There’s some major and critical errors that we believe exist in the STAAR test that all the students took, and we would like to get the entire STAAR test thrown out for all students in all school districts across the State of Texas,” Maddox said.

Maddox said the use of artificial intelligence to grade written responses on the STAAR test invalidates their results. He added that new rules narrowing access to alternative STAAR tests for special education students was also problematic.

“The state has utilized a computer AI grading system for the first time in the state’s history,” Maddox said. “Where this program came from, who programmed it, [and] its validity is all under complete scrutiny because there’s no information out there on it at all. We do know that it was a multi-million-dollar purchase of taxpayer money, and we also know that it spat out a lot of erroneous results and gave students a lot of zeros where the human grader would have given either partial credit or full credit.”

Maddox said his team also is arguing that the STAAR test has not been analyzed by professionals called psychometricians.

A statement provided by a spokesperson for the Texas Education Agency said the agency is reviewing the new lawsuit and “will evaluate appropriate next steps.”

“The A-F accountability system is good for kids,” agency officials said in the statement. “It is why the legislature adopted a strong A-F framework to help improve the quality of student learning across the state, give parents a clear understanding of how well their schools are performing and establish clear expectations for school leaders so they can better serve students. It is disappointing that a small group of school boards and superintendents opposed to fair accountability and transparency have once again filed a lawsuit aimed at preventing A-F ratings from being issued and keeping families in the dark about how their schools are doing.”

Last year’s lawsuit blocking 2022-2023 accountability ratings is currently going through the appeals process. More than 100 districts eventually joined that suit.

Maddox said he expected more school districts to join this year’s lawsuit as well.

“We have multiple school districts whose superintendents have told us it is going to their board to join a lawsuit like this,” he explained. “That process takes time.”

The five initial plaintiffs in the 2024 lawsuit are Forney ISD and Crandall ISD in North Texas, Fort Stockton ISD and Pecos-Barstow-Toyah ISD in West Texas, and Kingsville ISD in the Coastal Bend area near Corpus Christi. Forney ISD, with about 17,000 students, is the largest school district in the initial cohort.

During the hearing scheduled for Aug. 26, the judge could either lift the restraining order or continue to block the commissioner from releasing the A-F ratings until the case is decided.

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