Officials at Tomball and Magnolia ISDs have cautioned against taking preliminary accountability ratings for the districts too seriously. The Texas Education Agency released a work-in-progress report Jan. 6, showcasing district and campus performance in four areas from the 2015-16 academic year, using a new A-F rating system.

“School officials across Texas, including Tomball, are concerned about these ratings because they are based upon old data and cannot be regarded as a reliable benchmark for accountability,” TISD Superintendent Huey Kinchen said in a statement.

The controversial system change comes as a result of House Bill 2804 passed by the 84th Texas Legislature in 2015.

The first official ratings under the new system will be released in August 2018, reflecting district and student performance in the 2016-17 academic year. Until then, the existing “met standard” accountability system will remain in place as an official measure for school performance.

Under the new system, the four domains, or performance areas, measure student achievement, student progress, closing performance gaps and postsecondary readiness. State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness results, attendance rates and economically disadvantaged numbers factor into the four domains.

“It’s unfair to look at these ratings and say, ‘This is the end-all, be-all,” TEA Spokesperson Lauren Callahan said. “Especially when you consider [postsecondary readiness] there are [data] that we will be collecting by the summer of 2018 that we were not collecting in the summer of 2016.”

MISD received letter grades of B, C, D and D in the four domains, respectively. TISD received letter grades of A, A, B and C in the four domains, respectively.

“Unfortunately, the A-F rating is an oversimplification of complicated rules and calculations which do not provide a comprehensive picture of a student’s abilities,” Kinchen said. “The A-F rating does not reflect the outstanding work of Tomball ISD’s students and teachers.”

Because of the measures used to score districts, the MISD board of trustees adopted a resolution at its Jan. 9 meeting, which calls on the Texas Legislature to repeal and replace the A-F rating system with a community-based accountability system. In doing so, the district joins hundreds of school districts in petitioning the Legislature, MISD Superintendent Todd Stephens said.

“This isn’t an anti-accountability [resolution]; we just have some real concerns about [how] this A-F part of it is being set up,” Stephens said during the meeting.

Anita Hebert, MISD assistant superintendent of curriculum, said the TEA has set up the rating system to appear as a failing system, as a large number of districts received letter grades of C or below.

“They’re not grades that make us feel great about what we believe about our school system,” she said during the meeting. “[The TEA] set it up for most of the schools to have Cs as the satisfactory level.’”

However, MISD board Vice President Chuck Adcox also said the district is not defined by a series of letters.

“We don’t believe these scores define [our educators] or this district,” he said during the meeting. “This is disheartening that [the TEA] would do this and throw this [report] out there with incomplete data. You set Texas [public schools] up to look like fools.”