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Texas’ largest charter school network is intervening in a lawsuit that has temporarily blocked the Texas Education Agency from publishing academic accountability grades for the 2023-2024 school year.
“We are standing up for the right of Texas families to access the information they need to make decisions about their children’s education and for the right of citizens to hold schools accountable for their performance,” IDEA Public Schools CEO and Superintendent Jeff Cottrill said in a statement released Thursday night.
IDEA is asking the court to allow TEA to release the grades, which give schools and districts AF letter grades based on the agency’s calculation of their academic performance.
On August 12, a Travis County judge temporarily blocked the TEA from publishing AF scores after five Texas school districts filed a lawsuit challenging the validity of the standardized tests on which the scores are largely based.
Lawyers for the school districts that filed the lawsuit say the TEA’s decision to use computers to score written responses on STAAR tests invalidates the results.
“The state has used an artificial intelligence grading system for the first time in state history,” said attorney Nick Maddox in an interview with TPR. “This produced many erroneous results and gave students many zeros when the human grader would have given partial credit or full credit.”
Maddox also said the evidence should be reviewed by independent experts.
TEA officials have said the increase in zeros on STAAR writing responses this year is due to due to a change in scoringnot because computers grade them.
Prior to being hired by IDEA in 2022, Cottrill served as TEA’s Deputy Commissioner for Governance and Accountability.
IDEA petition in Intervention by Texas Public Radio
In its motion to intervene in the lawsuit, IDEA attorneys argued that preventing TEA from publishing AF ratings hurts charter schools like IDEA.
“The AF system’s influence on charter schools extends beyond public perception; it is intrinsically tied to their ability to survive and grow within the educational landscape,” IDEA attorneys said in the petition.
“As the Texas nonprofit charter school owner, IDEA operates under the Texas Education Agency (TEA) AF accountability system to shape its educational strategies, influence public perception, and determine student enrollment patterns,” the petition noted.
The current ban on posting grades is temporary. A hearing scheduled for Sept. 16 will determine whether grades will remain blocked until the lawsuit is decided. That hearing was originally scheduled for Aug. 26 but was rescheduled.
A similar lawsuit filed last year blocked the TEA from releasing AF grades for the 2022-2023 school year. More than a hundred districts eventually joined the suit, which challenged changes the TEA made to how it measured accountability after the students on whom the measurements were based had already graduated.
School districts face serious consequences if they receive a failing grade in the accountability system for several years in a row. The TEA can take over an entire district even if only one campus fails for five years in a row. as happened before the Houston Independent School District takeover.
Last year, nearly 77,000 students were enrolled in IDEA schools across Texas, including at campuses in San Antonio, El Paso, Houston, Tarrant County and the Rio Grande Valley.
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