Dozens of Houston ISD campuses will improve their academic ratings in 2024, a marker of progress after HISD’s first year under state-appointed leadership, according to preliminary scores released by the district Wednesday.
On an A-through-F letter grade scale, the number of A- and B-rated schools roughly doubled, while the number of D- and F-rated schools dropped by about two-thirds, the district’s ratings show.
The grades are generated through a complicated formula based largely on standardized test results, and families often use them as shorthand to gauge campuses’ effectiveness educating their children. HISD used the state’s methodology to calculate its scores and said the results should be “pretty close” to the official grades the Texas Education Agency plans to release Aug. 15.
Out of about 265 HISD schools that received letter grades, the number of schools rated an A or B jumped from 93 to 170; the number of schools graded a D or F dropped from 121 to 41, according to the district.
Gains were largest among a group of 85 schools that participated in the overhaul program instituted last year by Superintendent Mike Miles, who was installed by the TEA alongside a new school board in June 2023 amid academic sanctions against HISD.
“It was a near-impossible feat that the teachers and students pulled off,” Miles said Tuesday. “It really says we’re making good progress.”
The ratings have been highly anticipated in HISD because the TEA has said the district must have zero multi-year failing schools, among several other requirements, before it can begin to transition back to locally elected leadership. Last year, the state did not release official scores due to legal challenges surrounding a new grading formula, but HISD crunched its own numbers and projected more than 100 schools would have received D or F ratings.
Miles declined to provide the grades for individual schools because he said the district’s scores still could differ slightly from what the state releases later this month.
Seven consecutive failing grades at one campus, Phillis Wheatley High School in the city’s Fifth Ward, triggered the TEA takeover of HISD. Now, after the first year of intervention, the eyes of many Houstonians likely will return to Wheatley and other chronically underperforming schools to see whether their scores have improved.
Miles also declined to predict the district’s overall letter grade, but said he expects improvement. HISD was a B-rated district in 2022, but likely would have fallen to a C rating in 2023 if a court-ordered injunction had not blocked the release of the scores.
“We’re going to outpace all the other districts with regard to the increase in accountability score,” Miles said.
Making the grade
The TEA generates schools’ A-through-F grades based on several factors, including:
- students’ performance on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, commonly known as STAAR
- how much students improve year-over-year on those tests
- success in closing achievement gaps between demographic groups
- graduation rates and the number of students deemed ready for college, a career or the military (This measure is for high schools only.)
Each factor can have a different amount of influence on the overall score. However, the second measure in particular, year-over-year improvement, helped propel many HISD campuses to higher grades this year, Miles said. HISD students at dozens of schools posted above-average growth on STAAR exams last spring, according to results released in June.
That means HISD schools likely will need to continue a high level of growth to maintain their elevated ratings for years to come.
“We are still behind the state,” Miles said. “So, there’s no resting on the laurels. We’re going to have to have a good year this year, too.”
Asher Lehrer-Small covers Houston ISD for the Landing. Reach him at asher@houstonlanding.org.
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