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This article was shared with the principals by Mr. Worthy regarding the Texas Accountability System. You can read the full article with this link:

By Maria Luisa Cesar : August 3, 2013 : Updated: August 3, 2013 10:53pm

This week, the Texas Education Agency will release a tsunami of reports rating Texas public schools under a new accountability system.

Designed to credit schools that increased academic achievement even if they didn't deliver glowing test scores, the new system grades schools and districts across four indexes: student achievement, student progress, closing performance gaps and postsecondary readiness.

The accountability system is the state's way of measuring how well schools are doing in educating kids. The old one could sink a school based solely on the standardized test scores of its lowest-performing students. Educators pleaded for more flexibility, and the TEA didn't rate schools at all last year while it overhauled the system.

But some who have looked closely at Index No. 2, the new method of calculating student progress, say it might be as much a curse as a blessing when the reports come out Thursday.

“It doesn't look right, feel right or smell right,” said Mike Lara, director of research and technology services for North East Independent School District, the second largest in San Antonio…

…He'll have a hard time explaining to parents that a student can pass the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR) test in a subject one year, pass it the following year and still fail to meet state progress standards, he said.

The opposite is true for students who fail the test in a subject area one year, fail it in the next grade the following year but make improvements on their progress score.

What's more, the measuring stick the state is using to calculate student progress is based on the STAAR's “final passing standards,” the tougher test-passing threshold that won't take effect until the 2015-16 school year at the earliest.

Although documents released by the TEA said those methods will have “minimal impact,” Lara said using the toughest standard may leave more schools vulnerable to a grading system he called confusing at best and demoralizing at worst.

There's no consensus among educators here on whether the student progress measure will have as dire an impact as Lara is projecting. Some didn't see a problem with it. A few school officials declined to comment on how the state was making its calculations, saying they didn't know enough about it…

Accountability

Passed in 2009, House Bill 3 paved the way for the STAAR test and the accountability system it's now tied to. Advisory committees eventually recommended an index-based system but proposed holding off on implementing the student progress index this year.

The four indexes measure student performance on the STAAR test, the difference in that performance from one year to the next, how effectively a school is closing achievement gaps between different groups of students and how prepared students are for higher-level coursework.

Schools and school districts will have to meet performance targets in each index, although no such target has been set for the student progress index yet. Instead, the Index 2 target score will be derived from how all schools fare, in effect grading on a “curve,” with the lowest 5 percent considered failing.

“By definition, 5 percent will not make it over that bar no matter how well they do,” Whitsett said. If a school misses the mark in a single index, it fails to meet the state standards altogether — leading some to argue that it's as much as an all-or-nothing accountability system as the previous one…