The Ector County Independent School District (ECISD) Board of Trustees voted in support of a resolution authorizing the district to join several other schools that are suing the Texas Education Agency over its alleged lack of transparency in the calculation of school district accountability ratings, the board announced on Sept. 5.
“We believe in high standards, and we want high standards,” Superintendent Dr. Scott Muri said. “We believe in accountability. The challenge here is that the rules were not released in time; the 2022-23 school year started before the rules were released.”
Muri added that ECISD and its fellow plaintiff districts played a game in which they didn’t know the rules. “Now, we are being held accountable to a set of rules that we didn’t know, and that’s the real problem,” the superintendent said, according to the district's recap of its Sept. 5 meeting.
One of the proposed new TEA accountability rules that the ECISD is calling into question is the threshold for a school or a district to score an “A” for College Career and Military Readiness (CCMR). The standard is to rise from 60% to 88% for the 2022-23 accountability year and be retroactively applied to those who graduated high school in 2022, the board said.
The district says the TEA didn’t inform it about the changes before the start of the previous academic year and still hasn’t provided complete clarification. The lawsuit targeting TEA requests that a judge bar the issuance of the performance ratings for the last school year.
The Midland Times previously reported that ECISD touted improvements in the results for grades 3-8 from the 2023 State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) test.