On August 12th, a Travis County Judge blocked the Texas Education Agency (TEA) from releasing the results of their 2024 Accountability Ratings. According to the Texas Tribune, “Families have had five years without a complete set of school ratings. Texas schools and districts did not get ratings in 2020 or 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And in 2022, struggling schools set to get a D or an F got extra relief: Senate Bill 1365 directed TEA to forgo official ratings for those schools, sparing them from any sanctions and giving them time to respond to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.” Unfortunately, accountability ratings will be shelved once again while tied up in litigation, leaving parents without answers on the performance of their kids and school campuses.

As a community we cannot measure gains in our school districts without a robust and transparent measurement system.  Nor can we identify those schools and students struggling the most to know where to target much needed resources.  These results are a critical piece of maintaining public transparency and accountability in our school districts and ensuring our kids are served well.

Further, in the case of Houston ISD, continued improvement is an important benchmark to ending the state’s intervention and returning to elected leaders who can make decisions and guide the future path of HISD.

The TEA ratings might be an imperfect system – but we cannot let perfect become the enemy of good.  Measuring school quality through the state’s rating system provides an important picture of education in Texas. We do our children a disservice when we delay the release of these metrics, hindering progress and the goal of strengthening every school across the state.