HISD Shows Promising Growth in Unofficial 2024 School Ratings

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) is, in theory, required by law to release annual accountability ratings for every campus across Texas. These ratings provide valuable insight into how our schools are doing at providing students with the academic foundation they'll need for long-term, sustained success. TEA's rating system looks not just at overall student achievement, as measured by the annual State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR), but also at how schools perform relative to other campuses with similar student populations, how well high school graduates are prepared for college, career, or military, and whether key student groups are making necessary progress.

For the past two years, however, these ratings have not been released. In response to changes to rating calculations prior to the release of the ratings for the 2022-2023 school year and changes to how STAAR tests were scored prior to the release of ratings for the 2023-2024 school year, a group of school districts successfully sued to block the initial release of the ratings. Both lawsuits remain pending.

Although the official TEA accountability ratings have not been released for 2023 or 2024, the agency provided school districts with the data and methodology necessary to calculate their own ratings internally. For the second year in a row, Houston ISD was one of the few districts across the state to release these unofficial ratings publicly.

HISD showed great progress in their unofficial school ratings from 2023 to 2024, the first year after the state of Texas intervened in the district and appointed new leadership following years of chronic low performance at some campuses. 45% of HISD campuses* were rated a D or F in the district's unofficial calculations in the 2022-2023 school year; this number fell to 16% for the 2023-2024 school year. At the same time, the number of A- or B-rated campuses jumped from 34% in 2023 to 62% in 2024.

This dramatic shift was not just at small schools - the proportion of HISD's students attending A or B schools in 2024 also rose dramatically. Where barely 1-in-3 HISD students attended a A- or B-rated campuses in 2023, well over half of students did so in 2024.

While these gains should be celebrated, it remains to be seen whether they can be sustained over the long-term. TEA's ratings calculations use campuses' higher score out of student growth or their performance relative to campuses with similar student populations. This means that many campuses may use their growth scores for their ratings in years of significant achievement gains - like 2024 for HISD.

In fact, 55% of HISD campuses had high growth scores in 2024, compared to only 22% in 2023. This change contributed significantly to the district's ratings increase from one year to the next.

Looking specifically at the 85 campuses in the administration's New Education System for 2023-2024 school year, fully 79% of those schools had high growth scores in 2024, compared to only 29% in 2023. If year-over-year growth falls back closer to historical norms in the 2024-2025 school year, some HISD campuses which showed progress in school ratings may appear to backslide. This trend is one to monitor as we look at the future of the state intervention in HISD and consider what may come after.