Fort Worth ISD at Risk for State Takeover After 2023 Ratings Released

By Sneha Dey, The Texas Tribune

FORT WORTH, TX — The Fort Worth school district could be forced to shut down a chronically underperforming school or submit to a takeover from the state, based on annual state ratings released Thursday morning.

The Texas Education Agency released its A-F grades for the 2022-23 school year, the first complete set of scores in five years. School ratings had not been released due to court battles and pauses to the rating system during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fort Worth ISD’s Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Middle School was the only school that has failed state ratings for five years in a row, the threshold to meet bruising state penalties.

Three school districts — Connally, San Antonio and Jasper — had campuses with four consecutive years of unacceptable grades. They could face state sanctions if their performance lags for one more year.

At Wichita Falls ISD, district leaders preemptively shut down Kirby Middle School in the fall of 2023 after years of low ratings.

Schools can also take advantage of a different life raft: hand over the management of underperforming schools to a nonprofit, university or charter groups and get a two-year pause from sanctions. The charter school Third Future Schools, for example, is overseeing the operations of a struggling elementary school in Midland.

Of the 8,539 public schools evaluated in the state, 19.3% got an A. Another 33.6% got a B and 24.7% got a C. About one in five campuses failed to meet academic standards, with 14.8% earning a D and 7.6% earning an F.

Performance scores for schools and districts are determined based on three categories: how students perform on state tests and meet college and career readiness benchmarks; how students improve over time; and how well schools are educating their most disadvantaged students.

Overall grades declined for many campuses since the 2021-2022 school year. Half of the state’s campuses received A or B grades, a decline of about 20 percentage points from the previous school year. The state only released partial scores that year.

TEA Commissioner Mike Morath attributed that decline to a drop in academic growth as schools worked to recover from the pandemic.

Many school district leaders, meanwhile, have attributed the declines to stricter college and career readiness standards. For the first time, schools had to show that 88% of their graduating high school students were college or career-ready to get an A, up from the 60% benchmark in previous years. About 10,000 more students met the requirements to prove college and career readiness.

“We keep raising the bar so that Texas is a leader in preparing students for postsecondary success,” TEA Commissioner Mike Morath said at a press roundtable.

The release of the A-F ratings comes after legal battles over changes to how schools are scored. More than 120 school districts sought to block the release of the 2023 ratings because they said TEA had not given them adequate notice before rolling out stricter college and career readiness benchmarks.

Earlier this month, an appeals court cleared TEA to make the 2023 A-F grades public, ruling that Morath did not overstep his authority when he changed the scoring metrics.