The largest charter school network in Texas is intervening in a lawsuit that has temporarily blocked the Texas Education Agency from releasing academic accountability ratings for the 2023-2024 school year.
“We are standing up for the right of Texas families to access information they need to make decisions about their children’s education and for the public’s right to hold schools accountable for their performance,” IDEA Public Schools CEO and Superintendent Jeff Cottrill said in a statement released Thursday evening.
IDEA is petitioning the court to allow TEA to release the ratings, which gives schools and districts A-F letter grades based on the agency’s calculation of their academic performance.
A Travis County judge temporarily blocked TEA from releasing the A-F ratings Aug. 12, after five Texas school districts filed a lawsuit questioning the validity of the standardized tests the ratings are primarily based on.
Attorneys for the school districts who filed the suit claim TEA’s decision to use computers to grade written responses on the STAAR tests invalidates the results.
“The state has utilized a computer AI grading system for the first time in the state's history,” Attorney Nick Maddox said in an interview with TPR. “It spat out a lot of erroneous results and gave students a lot of zeros where the human grader would have given either partial credit or full credit.”
Maddox also said the tests need to be analyzed by independent experts.
TEA officials have said the increase in zeros on STAAR’s written responses this year are due to a change in scoring, not because computers are grading them.
Before he was hired by IDEA in 2022, Cottrill was TEA’s deputy commissioner of governance and accountability.
In their petition intervening in the lawsuit, IDEA’s attorneys said preventing TEA from releasing the A-F ratings hurts charter schools like IDEA.
“The A-F 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’s attorneys said in the petition.
“As a Texas non-profit charter school holder, IDEA operates under the Texas Education Agency’s A-F accountability system to shape its educational strategies, influence public perception, and determine student enrollment patterns,” the petition said.
The current ban on releasing the ratings is temporary. A hearing scheduled for September 16 will determine whether the ratings will remain blocked until the lawsuit is decided. That hearing was originally scheduled for Aug. 26, but it was rescheduled.
A similar lawsuit filed last year prevented TEA from releasing A-F ratings for the 2022-2023 school year. More than a hundred districts eventually joined the suit, which took issue with changes TEA made to the way it measured accountability after students the measurements were based on had already graduated.
School districts face severe consequences if they receive a failing grade on the accountability system for multiple years in a row. TEA can take over an entire district even if only a single campus fails for five consecutive years, as happened prior to the Houston ISD takeover.
Nearly 77,000 students were enrolled in IDEA schools across Texas last year, including campuses in San Antonio, El Paso, Houston, Tarrant County and the Rio Grande Valley.
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