Region 12 superintendents react to proposed accountability system
By LYNETTE SOWELL
Grade school students have received letter grades to mark academic progress and assessment for decades, and in 2015 the Texas legislature mandated that public schools start receiving letter grades for how they’re doing where it concerns students’ achievement and progress as well.
During Christmas break, the Texas Education Agency released the preliminary “grades” for Texas school districts which would replace the present “met standard” or “improvement required” system. This new grading system for districts measured data in five areas, including STAAR testing scores, college readiness, individual student growth, economically disadvantaged student scores, absenteeism, along with local programs, which weren’t included in this first rollout of grades. The A-F ratings don’t become effective until 2018 and this first set of trial ratings was based on data from the 2015-2016 school year.
On Friday, Copperas Cove ISD superintendent Joe Burns traveled to Waco, where he and other superintendents and administrators from 29 area school districts gathered at the Region 12 Education Service Center for a media conference about the proposed grading system.
With this system, it’s possible for a district to receive distinctions with the current measurement program in place by TEA, but receive a C—average letter grade—or even fail in one of the five domains of the proposed program.
Burns had the chance to speak his thoughts on the proposed new grading system.
“It’s a test that came out of left field, an evaluation tool that hasn’t been very clear, it hasn’t been well discussed. I will tell you that it’s my understanding that to earn or determine one grade, it takes 42 pages of size 9 single-spaced font to determine one of the A-F ratings,” Burns told those assembled. “Folks, I don’t know about you, but if we were to take children in the classroom and assign them 42 pages of work to do before they could ever get a grade and it was written in such a way they didn’t understand it or had never been explained to them, I don’t think they would succeed.
Every school in our district has met standard. We’ve earned more academic distinctions than we’ve ever earned. We’ve had kids that have gone to national competitions and have won. TEA counts us as a very good district, the Federal government counts us as a very good district in Copperas Cove, but if you look at our grades under A-F, we are average at best.”
Burns also described how students could look at that grading and question if the teachers and meaningful adults in their lives aren’t as good as they thought they were, and that the system could be a detriment to educators as well, especially the ones who have tried to make a difference in the lives of their students for decades.
“I agree with my peers that we are a system that loves and relishes the opportunity to demonstrate success. Give us a challenge and we will rise to it, but you have to clarify what that challenge is. You have to be able to detail to us how to succeed and you have to say, this what we’re going to use to do it.”
There is a full statement from Burns on the district’s website under the link “A letter to CCISD stakeholders from CCISD Superintendent Dr. Joe Burns in response to the A-F Accountability Rating System” at ccisd.com.
The full preliminary report of Texas school districts, including CCISD grades for the district and each campus, can be found at http://tea.texas.gov/Student_Testing_and_Accountability/Accountability/A... with a link located to the full report at 2015-16 A-F Ratings Report_fnl_2017.