ARLINGTON, Texas – Arlington ISD students head back to class on Wednesday.
Behind the scenes, the district’s officials are dealing with a dilemma that will show up in Arlington ISD’s accountability ratings to be released by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) on Friday.
What we know:
Like several other districts, including Dallas ISD, Arlington submitted a portion of its STAAR test results to be re-scored by humans rather than the state’s newly adopted automated system.
The Arlington ISD superintendent says this resulted in a significant improvement that would raise the A through F scores for at least five individual campuses.
But an unfortunate error in submitting the district’s re-scores caused a delay, and a missed deadline.
“We take all of this information seriously. We don’t believe the accountability system is the whole story of what a school is and what it means to students and families, but we know it’s a piece of the puzzle,” said Arlington ISD Superintendent, Matt Smith.
“Our re-score information, we submitted on time, shows that we had receipts for it, and there was an error on the back end. So, we didn’t get the re-score results at the same time that Dallas did, and everybody else did.”
What they’re saying:
Superintendent Smith says the error involved entering the re-score information onto the state’s platform and that means those improved scores are not yet reflected.
“How it impacted us is that those re-score results were not able to be included in the accountability score calculations that will be released this Friday. So we are going to be filing an appeal as soon as those are released because, based on our projections, based on the re-scores, we’ve had it and a significant increase for us,” said Smith.
Dig deeper:
Superintendent Smith says the delayed calculations will affect the overall scores for at least five campuses. It likely will not affect the district’s overall rating, as the district predicts it will be rated a C.
“Without the re-scores, we project our district to be a C. We have 70 campuses in our district that have their own individual rating,” said Smith.
“We believe we will see an increase in five of our campus letter grades and significant score improvement across multiple campuses.”
The Source: Information in this article was provided by Arlington ISD.