There’s one sobering constant in trying to improve a school district: Whether it’s in Collin or Dallas or another county, even when you’ve made significant progress, there are still big challenges ahead.
That's the situation in which Dallas ISD finds itself after the release last week of the latest A-F academic accountability grades. The district deserves high-fives for again earning an overall B, achieving a grade five points higher from 81 last year to 86. But we're disappointed that the number of schools on the failing list doubled from 4 to 8.
To improve its overall score while getting the sobering news that more schools got F's means the district is doing a lot of things right. It reminds us, though, that raising the performance so that every child has a legitimate shot at a decent education takes persistence and dogged determination at reform.
Superintendent Michael Hinojosa tells us that his staff is already hard at work analyzing the scores and developing strategies for improvements. It’s the first year that individual campuses received grades, and he expected his slate of poor performers to shrink, not grow.
He acknowledges that his staff underestimated the impact the culture and climate of new leadership can have on a school. Five of the eight schools receiving F's had new principals last year, which he said tells him the district needs to do more to support and train its new leaders while continuing efforts to recruit and retain the best teachers.
He knows that’s a recipe that can work. Just six years ago, 43 DISD schools were on the failing list. Hard-fought reforms — namely the Accelerated Campus Excellence plan, which teams the best teachers with the students who need them most — get most of the credit for that remarkable turnaround. And it's led to across-the-board increases on STAAR tests.
But it’s one thing to get schools off the failing list. It’s quite another to keep them from falling back. Four DISD schools that received B's and C's last year plummeted to F's this year.
Hinojosa is smart to try to expand that program to incentivize more of the best to stay in troubled schools longer. The ACE program currently allows for only three-year stints for those teachers.
We’re encouraged that the district now has the money to do so.
Thankfully, Texas lawmakers finally did their jobs this session, pumping more money into public schools. For DISD, it means it gets to keep about $22 million that would have otherwise been sent back to the state through recapture. It means DISD can double down on its innovative programs that are starting to bear fruit.
And taxpayers invested more by approving a tax ratification measured last year to shore up the game-changing efforts such as pre-kindergarten and early college high schools that are some of the main tenets of the district’s overall success.
Stunningly, there are still a lot of critics of the state’s letter grade system. Some still believe it doesn’t truly take into account the challenges educators face. They argue that A-F further stigmatizes schools in poor areas when labeled as failing because those students typically struggle more because of limited resources and myriad social issues outside of school.
But we’ve supported this system from the beginning because it provides parents with transparency and holds districts accountable for what they’re supposed to be doing: raising educational achievement for the state’s 5 million kids.
We know educating kids is hard work. We applaud the consistently high-performing Plano, Frisco and Highland Park for earning top marks again this year — with Lovejoy again leading the state's traditional schools with a score of 98. But even McKinney saw its grade drop from A to B.
Educators — especially in districts like DISD, where 90 percent of the students are poor — know they can’t afford to rest on their innovative laurels. DISD has been rightly held up as a state model for how serious reforms can lead to transformative gains in closing achievement gaps.
But no district can be happy with a school that falls a letter grade, and having failing schools in any district is unacceptable.
Getting this right by producing well-educated and well-trained contributors to the workforce is too important to the economic success of this entire state.
DISD A-F GRADES
2019 - 2018
Overall Grade: B-B (Same)
Number of A schools: 28-33 (Down 5)
Number of B schools: 102-93 (Up 9)
Number of C schools: 76-81 (Down 5)
Number of D schools: 12-20 (Down 8)
Number of F schools: 8-4 (Up 4)
Source: Texas Education Agency