TEA A-F Ratings Explained
Today, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) released preliminary school accountability grades for every public Texas school and district. Accountability scores range from 0 to 99, corresponding to letter grades:
- Above 90% = A
- 80-89 = B
- 70-79 = C
- 60-69 = D
- Below 60 = F
While TEA did not provide letter grades to individual schools last year, it did provide numeric scores to each school, which can serve as a proxy for the letter grades above.
These ratings are determined based on three domains – Student Achievement, School Progress, and Closing the Gaps. Every public school is given a score in each domain, and the overall score is based on the Closing the Gaps score and the higher of the Student Achievement and School Progress scores.
Student Achievement measures whether students met grade-level expectations, which is determined by the STAAR test. This domain also considers graduation rates and how prepared students are for life after high school.
School Progress measures two areas—how students performed on the STAAR test this year compared to last year and how much better students are doing academically at the district compared to similar districts.
Closing the Gaps compares performance gaps among different student populations based on race and ethnicity, special education, English Language learner status, mobility, and economically disadvantaged status.
Districts have 30 days to clarify the results before ratings will be finalized. While we know that no rating system is perfect, we acknowledge the need for a transparent accountability system that allows all educators, parents, and community members to know how our public schools are performing. We believe the TEA A–F rating system does just that, and we encourage families and community members to learn more about their local schools’ ratings at www.txschools.org, where an individual school can be searched and researched.
