ECTOR COUNTY, Texas — Performance ratings for Texas schools are drawing complaints in the form of a lawsuit. Several Texas school districts, including Pecos-Barstow-Toyah ISD and Fort Stockton ISD, have joined together in litigation against the Texas Education Agency.
On Tuesday night, Ector County ISD discussed joining in as well, and the ECISD board of trustees voted in favor of joining the battle against the TEA. The school district will be part of an intervening group of school districts separate from those other West Texas ISD’s, but they are all in the same fight together.
The TEA has yet to complete its assignment.
“Let us know the rules before the game begins," said Dr. Scott Muri, Superintendent of Ector County ISD.
Dr. Muri says the TEA unlawfully failed to supply all of the accountability rules before the start of the 2022-2023 school year.
“We look at data to help us organize ourselves centrally so that we can support schools effectively, and what we don’t yet know is ‘how did our schools perform last year?’," Dr. Muri said. "We should have known that this summer so that we could organize ourselves and do the work appropriately, but we’re waiting kind of for a big surprise in a couple of weeks and that may cause us to create structural change, and that’s caused harm.”
The A-through-F accountability system was created for transparency, but that’s not the case right now.
“The State of Texas will see a decline," Dr. Muri said. "We’ve gotten better academically – our STAAR scores, our end-of-course exam scores, our CCMR [college, career and military readiness] – all of these numbers are better for us, but the letter grade is going to be lower and that just doesn’t make any sense. I can see the confusion from our parents, ‘how could you be better, but yet, your grade is lower?’, but that is going to be the reality in this new system.”
A new system that saw rules changing in the middle of the school year.
“The bar has been raised, which I’m OK with the bar being raised, but we need some time to accommodate and to make any adjustments that we need to make organizationally to make sure that we can meet the demands of the new bar," Dr. Muri said.
As ECISD joins this fight, the district wants fair play.
“We want to make sure that our kids and staff members are not harmed, that’s what we’re trying to do," Dr. Muri said. "I think that the challenge here is that the rules were not released in time. The school year started before the rules were released, so we didn’t know the rules of the game – yet we were playing the game – and so we’re being held accountable to a set of rules that we didn’t know, so that’s the real problem here.”
Dr. Muri mentioned that their college, career and military readiness score that was an 'A' would be a 'D' under the new system of accountability rules. He noted that this litigation is to stop the release of those A-through-F ratings and call the 2022-2023 school year a year of change.