TEA Can Release 2024 A-F Ratings, Appeals Court Rules
The three judge Texas Fifteenth Court of Appeals unanimously ruled on Thursday (July 3, 2025) — in a majority and a concurring/dissenting opinion — that the TEA can release the 2024 A-F accountability ratings.
- Note: This is a follow-up to the ruling that the Fifteenth Court unanimously issued (article) exactly 90 days before (on April 3, 2025) — that the education commissioner could release the 2023 ratings, which the commissioner proceeded to do on April 24, 2025.
The commissioner released the 2023 ratings after the 121 plaintiffs in the prior lawsuit (Kingsville ISD, et al., v. Morath) didn’t appeal.
The justices, in this latest ruling involving 33 ISDs (Pecos-Barstow-Toyah ISD, et al. v. Morath), unanimously concluded that they had already considered, and rejected, three of the four primary arguments arising from their prior (Kingsville ISD, et al.) ruling.
The justices, as they had done in the prior Kingsville ISD decision, unanimously ruled that:
- The commissioner can adopt the current-year accountability standards at any time in a school year, and the standards do not have to be adopted prior to the beginning of the accountability-rated school year.
- The commissioner can the raise College, Career, and Military Readiness (CCMR) accountability standards at any time.
- The Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) that the commissioner appointed — that consisted of national assessment and psychometric experts — weren’t required to be involved in the development of STAAR tests or to formally declare that the tests were “valid and reliable.” The commissioner met his legal requirement to receive advice from the committee.
Divided
The three justices, however, were divided over the fourth claim by the ISD plaintiffs involving the legislative requirement of making the bulk of STAAR questions be nonmultiple choice (questions requiring a “constructive response”) — resulting in a need to score the answers via machines instead of by humans.
The plaintiffs argued that the machine scored answers to constructive response questions produced less accurate results than those that were human scored.
A two-member majority of the three-member Fifteenth Court concluded that the plaintiff ISDs had failed to provide expert testimony supporting their claim.
About 15.8 Million Answers
The majority pointed to the fact that the 2024 tests contained about 15.8 million possible answers to “constructive response” (nonmultiple choice) questions, for which the TEA was obligated to report STAAR test results back to districts within the tight deadline of 21 days.
The justices cited TEA estimates that it would cost an additional $15 million-to-$20 million to grade all the assessments by hand — and concluded that the “anecdotal” evidence presented by the plaintiffs did not contradict the testimony of experts presented by the TEA.
“Automated grading was not an experiment dreamed up by bureaucrats but a necessity due to legislative change,” the majority opinion says.
The third justice (although agreeing that the 2024 A-F accountability ratings must be released) conversely concluded that this portion of the plaintiff’s lawsuit must be returned to the trial judge to provide the plaintiffs with sufficient opportunity to put on expert testimony about their claims regarding hand v. machine STAAR scoring.
What’s Next
The plaintiff ISDs have the option of appealing the dismissal of the lawsuit to the Texas Supreme Court.
This is currently the only remaining legal challenge arising from a prior or upcoming A-F accountability release.
The commissioner is slated to publicly release the preliminary (subject to appeals) 2025 A-F accountability ratings on Aug. 15, 2025.
