The ratings were released April 24 after a delay due to lawsuits, TEA officials said.
The announcement follows an April 3 ruling by Texas’ 15th Court of Appeals, which overturned a lower court's injunction that had blocked the 2023 ratings for over a year.
In August 2023, over 100 school districts sued TEA Commissioner Mike Morath, arguing the agency’s revamped accountability system was “unlawful” and would unfairly harm school districts.
The state’s A-F accountability system was designed to measure whether students are ready for the next grade level and how well each district prepares them for success after high school, Community Impact previously reported.
“For far too long, families, educators and communities have been denied access to information about the performance of their schools, thanks to frivolous lawsuits paid for by tax dollars filed by those who disagreed with the statutory goal of raising career readiness expectations to help students,” Morath said in an April 24 news release.
TEA officials said the methods of calculating 2022-23 ratings were “updated to more accurately reflect performance.”
NCISD received 72 out of 100 points for 2022-23 while, TEA data shows.
“Public schools are nearly two accountability cycles past the ratings that the TEA is releasing for 2023,” said Scott Powers, NCISD’s executive director of public relations, via an April 24 email. “The district will review and consider the information shared by TEA this week in our ongoing efforts to provide a high-quality education for all students.”
The breakdown
According to the TEA’s latest accountability report, nearly 11% of traditional school districts across Texas earned an "A" rating, while 40% earned a "B." About 32% received a "C," 14% earned a "D" and 3% earned an "F."
NCISD had 18,315 students enrolled in 2022-23. During this time, at NCISD, about 74.2% of students were economically disadvantaged; 11.3% were in special education programs; and 34% were emergent bilingual students, TEA data shows.
Out of the NCISD campuses that received ratings:
- Three earned an A
- Four earned a B
- Five earned a C
- Five earned a D
- Two earned an F
Texas school districts last received ratings through the A-F system for the 2021-22 school year, when about one-third of districts statewide earned an "A" rating for 2021-22, and slightly more than half earned a "B," according to prior reporting.
Since the A-F system launched in 2017-18, NCISD has only received three official ratings due to three years of State of Disaster declarations:
- 2017-18: not rated due to Hurricane Harvey
- 2018-19: NCISD received 85 points, or a B
- 2019-20: not rated due to the COVID-19 pandemic
- 2020-21: not rated due to the COVID-19 pandemic
- 2021-22: NCISD received 84 points, or a B
- 2022-23: NCISD received 72 points, or a C
What’s next
The TEA remains blocked from issuing ratings for the 2023-24 school year due to a separate lawsuit, which is pending in the state appeals court. Morath also said the TEA intends to release ratings for 2024-25 on Aug. 15, per state law.
“A-F ratings are very public, and so that is a leadership challenge that our leaders bear, but this is the cross that we bear for being publicly funded and having the public’s children in our schools. It’s up to us to operate with the highest degree of transparency to deliver the best outcomes that we can for our kids,” Morath said April 22.
Danica Lloyd, Hannah Norton and Ryan Reynolds contributed to this report.
