Texas School Ratings Released, Big Drops Statewide
The Texas Education Agency recently released the 2011 District Accountability ratings, a system used to classify district schools into four categories: Exemplary, Recognized, Academically Acceptable and Academically Unacceptable.
The 2011 ratings dropped significantly compared to last year’s statewide. The number of unacceptable school rose from 104 to 569. Exemplary schools fell from 2,637 to 1,224.
ABC-7 tallied the numbers to see how the borderland’s three biggest school districts measured up. We calculated the ratings for the El Paso, Socorro and Ysleta Independent School Districts.
YISD is the only district that has an Unacceptable rating at one of its campuses. However, all three sawa big drop in the amount of Exemplary schools: they have a combined total of 36 exemplaries compared to 76 last year.
The dramatic drop is mostly due to changes in the TEA’s rating system. This year, the Texas Projection Measure, or TPM, was taken out of the rating system. The TPM boosted ratings in 2009 and 2010 by giving schools credit for their students’s projected performence instead of their raw test scores.
Also new this year is the addition of test scores for special education students and non-native English speakers.
The bar is also higher for schools that want to be exemplary. The dropout rate must be lower this year than the required percentage from last year and a greater amount of students must perform at a “commended” level, which means they must score roughly 90% or above on their TAKS.
TEA officials say the new ratings do not affect a school’s funding. They will not be used next year at all, since officials will be coming up with a new ratings system based on the STAAR test due to replace the TAKS.
