Tag Archive: TEA

House Public Education Committee Hears Interim Charges 

Legislative “Interim Charges”: What Are They and Why Do They Matter? The Texas Legislature meets once every two years for 140 days for its regular legislative session, during which the only bill it is required to pass and send to the governor’s desk to be signed into law is the budget for the next biennium.   We became all too familiar...

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Injunction Issued to Halt Controversial A-F labels  

This week, as the Texas House Committee on Public Education met to discuss private school vouchers that would syphon tax dollars from our public schools, a Travis County district court issued a temporary injunction to halt the release of the controversial A-F school ratings determined by the governor-appointed commissioner of education. Five public school districts petitioned the court to stop...

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TEA Rolls Out New School Safety System: Sentinel 

On July 25, Governor Greg Abbott announced the launch of a new school safety system called Sentinel. This new platform-- designed to collect, process, store, and distribute school safety and security information-- is housed within the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and is a part of ongoing school safety and security improvement measures.   We have written extensively about House Bill 3...

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The Flaws in Texas’ English Proficiency Testing Hurt Our Students 

English-learning students across Texas have faced an uphill battle with the Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System (TELPAS). In 2018, the test was redesigned, and the shift to automated computer scoring has led to a troubling trend — drastically lower scores that don’t seem to reflect students' true abilities, according to a Texas Tribune analysis.   For years, TELPAS was a...

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What STAAR Scores Actually Measure: Beyond the Classroom 

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) recently released data on high school STAAR test results, showing an improvement in students’ performance on English II but remaining largely stagnant from the prior year and still catching up to pre-COVID levels.  The Austin American-Statesman reported that, “Students who met grade level for the English I test remained at 54% this year, while the students...

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7 ISDs Join Lawsuit Against A-F Rating System

Late this spring, at the height of legislative chaos, Education Commissioner Mike Morath announced that he would be updating the A-F accountability system for Texas school districts to raise the bar for meeting the college, career, and military readiness (CCMR) indicator. He also announced that these new standards would apply retroactively for the 2022-2023 school year. 

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