Austin School District Misses Federal Target, Officials Say (TX)
June 29, 2010
The Austin school district is unlikely to meet federal academic improvement standards for a second year because of unsatisfactory performance on state exams by special education students, district officials said Monday .
The prediction is based on preliminary data, and district officials said a report being compiled by district staff was not immediately available. The federal school accountability ratings, which are being reworked this year, are usually announced in August.
Districts that repeatedly fail to meet federal standards, which are different from Texas’ accountability targets, are subject to sanctions that include having students transfer from low-performing schools to higher-performing schools, revamping campuses, replacing staff, transforming schools into charter schools or having the Texas Education Agency take over campuses.
"At this time, it appears that the district did not meet (the federal government’s goals for yearly progress) for special education, reading and math, the same result as last year," Superintendent Meria Carstarph en said in a memo to school board members. "Again, this is very preliminary information."
The district’s chief performance officer, Bill Caritj , could not be reached for comment Monday, and Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe said she hadn’t yet received any statewide data on the number of schools or districts that met the federal standards this year.
The district failed to meet the federal accountability standards for the first time in 2009, also because of special education student performance. In a statement last year, district officials said, "Austin special education student scores in reading and math, although higher than the previous year, fell slightly short of the higher standards."
Carstarphen’s memo to board members did not detail what happened this year.
The federal standards are based on graduation or attendance rates and participation and passing rates on the
reading and math portions of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. The requirements were established by the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, currently being rewritten.
No Child Left Behind will remain in effect as Congress works on a newer version, which could happen this year but might take longer.
"The even money in Washington is that NCLB won’t be changed this year," said Bob Wise, president of the Washington-based Alliance for Excellent Education and a former governor of West Virginia.
Wise, whose group is pushing for reauthorization this year, said: "Whatever benefits NCLB has brought, and I think it has been very important to shine a light on problems u2026 it d oesn’t provide adequate remedies to do something about them. It’s a bit like a compact disc in an iPod world."
The Austin school district also released information on the effect of the Texas Projection Measure on this year’s TAKS results.
First introduced by the state last year, the measure is based on student progress; it gives schools credit under both the Texas and federal accountability systems for students who don’t pass the TAKS but are projected to do so in a subsequent year.
The preliminary data show that without the use of the projection measure, four additional schools would probably have received the state’s lowest ranking, academically unacceptable: Eastside Memorial Global Tech High School and Garcia, Mendez and Burnet middle schools. With the measure in place, district officials estimate that only one school, Eastside Memorial Green Tech, will be rated academically unacceptable this year.
Last year, Austin had eight academically unacceptable schools, but there were 11 that would have received the ranking without the projection measure.