School administrators talk about TEA ratings

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August 4, 2011

By GREG RUSSELL, Register Staff Writer Gainesville Daily Register The Daily Register Thu Aug 04, 2011, 01:02 PM CDT

Cooke County — Cooke County school district representatives shared thoughts this week on how the Texas Education Agency rated their campuses. Some admitted regret about the ratings, released Friday, and some feel satisfaction. Among the districts, the agency bestowed only Lindsay and Muenster schools with the top-shelf “exemplary” rating. This means their students recently showed a passing rate of 90 percent or higher in all subgroups of Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills testing. Other rating factors in the exemplary title included school attendance, plus the status of a 25 percent rate of “commended” students with TAKS scores of at least 2400. Lindsay ISD Superintendent Dennis Holt said the commended-scoring factor was a new challenge, but it simply gave his students a higher hurdle to leap. “We’re very pleased with the official announcement,” Holt said. “We had gone through the numbers and felt confident that we would be exemplary, but you always want it to be official. “I’m very pleased with the teachers and students,” he added. “We’re glad that the hard work paid off for them.” Valley View ISD Superintendent William Stokes said he wasn’t happy his elementary and high school received “recognized” ratings, a notch below exemplary. This resulted in a recognized rating for his district overall. But he added his students showed a higher rate of “commended” test results than in 2010. He also said district staff recognized the area of weakness among their students. Math is probably the one area that’s hurting us,” he said. “Everything else we felt pretty good about.” Stokes admitted some of his students are still learning to speak English, clearly a testing hindrance. “They have some things to overcome that other kids don’t,” he said. “We’re putting plans in place to address the issues we have and we think we’ll see changes the next time around.” Don Metzler, Callisburg ISD director of curriculum and instruction, said he was disappointed his campus fell below “recognized” and into the rank of “academically acceptable,” which is a notch above “unacceptable.” The especially weak areas for some of the grade levels on campus, he explained, were math and writing. “The district has reviewed all the results, and one of the initiatives we’ll be bringing online is a supplemental curriculum to help benefit teachers and students,” Metzler said. He cited CSCOPE, a management program applicable to all school grades — and which his district will use alongside curriculums already in place. “It’s a science-based curriculum being used in more than 700 schools to give teachers a much clearer definition of the learning the students are expected to achieve,” he said. Other school districts, with campuses smaller than average, would seem to have cards stacked against their favor. Sivells Bend ISD was deemed academically acceptable. But Superintendent Phil Newton explained most of his students actually earned “recognized” or “exemplary”-level test grades in most of their subgroups. It was the district’s small campus count of around 60 that impacted the final result. “We missed being ‘recognized’ by one student missing two questions,” he said. “We had eight kids take the science test. When we’re so small, our numbers get skewed real quick.” As reported Friday, Gainesville and Walnut Bend districts were deemed academically acceptable while Era ISD was “recognized.” And an Associated Press story released Friday said Texas school ratings have “plummeted” under the TEA’s more rigorous recent standards. The number of “unacceptable” schools rose from 104 to 569, the story said, while “exemplary schools” dropped from 2,637 to 1,224. The story added that the TEA had recently eliminated a calculation called the “Texas Performance Measure,” which critics said allowed schools to count failing students as passing.

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