Breaking it down
Melissa Leigh, HISD senior director of personalized student success, presented trustees with an overview of the district’s efforts during the board’s Oct. 21 meeting.
Leigh described the CCMR rating as a ‘‘lagging indicator,’’ meaning the TEA uses data from the year prior when compiling a district’s score. Leigh noted the data used to compile HISD’s accountability rating for the 2024-25 school year reflects student outcomes from the 2023-24 school year.
While Leigh said HISD was behind the state in some CCMR measures in this year’s ratings, she said officials implemented multiple programs in 2024-25 that are expected to improve results for the district’s 2025-26 accountability ratings.
Some context
According to district data, HISD’s score for total CCMR criteria came out to 62% for the 2024-25 school year—20 percentage points behind the state average of 82%.
Leigh said the district’s score reflected practices that were implemented by former Superintendent Elizabeth Fagen, who was fired by the district in July 2024.
“To address the elephant in the room, we were given different directives by our previous administration,” Leigh said. “We were focusing on local indicators that were given to us and not the state indicators that are being measured for accountability.”
What's being done
Among the new programs implemented in the 2024-25 school year include Texas College Bridge, which Leigh said provides college prep courses that can help students avoid having to take remedial coursework at more than 100 partner colleges and institutions.
Leigh said the district’s inclusion in the program will help bolster CCMR data by providing students with more opportunities to earn credits for college prep courses.
Additionally, Leigh said the district is in the process of implementing a platform that will help the district keep better track of student CCMR progress.
“Prior to this year, we’ve not had a CCMR tracker,” Leigh said, noting student data was previously tracked using spreadsheets. “We’ve had no way for our campuses to track [student CCMR progress and] no way for them to really look at this individually for students.”
Leigh said the platform should help campuses improve career and technical education programming by ensuring students stay on course to complete necessary CTE courses related to the CTE track they’ve chosen.
“It’s going to be the place where students do their course planning,” Leigh said. “It won’t stop students from selecting out of their [CTE] pathway, but it will flag it so that counselors will be aware that they’re trying to switch, ... and we can have a conversation.”
Leigh noted the platform should boost CCMR scores by helping ensure students complete their CTE pathway prior to graduating.
