House Bill 22

HB 22, passed by the 85th Texas Legislature (2017), requires changes to the State public school accountability system.  HB 22 establishes three domains of indicators to evaluate the academic performance of districts and campuses: Student Achievement, School Progress, and Closing the Gaps. It requires the commissioner to adopt rules to assign districts a rating of A, B, C, D, or F for overall performance, as well as for performance in each domain, beginning in August 2018. Campuses will receive A–F ratings beginning in August 2019.

Additionally, HB 22 establishes local accountability systems to allow districts and charter schools to develop plans to locally evaluate their campuses. Once a plan receives approval from the agency, districts and charter schools may use locally developed domains and indicators together with the three state-mandated domains to assign overall A–F ratings for each campus.

Finally, HB 22 requires the commissioner to report to the legislature by January 1, 2019, the overall and domain performance rating each campus would have received for the 2017–18 school year if the A–F rating system for campuses had been in place.

Accountability advisory committees and subcommittees are expected to meet regularly throughout 2017 and early spring of 2018 to discuss options and specific issues related to the new accountability system. In addition to regular meetings, ESC directors have been asked to engage in additional discussions in August and September to try to reach consensus on several issues related to the new accountability system. Expect to hear information from your education service center in the coming weeks. Also, this month, agency staff will begin planning a local accountability pilot program, with the intent to launch the local accountability system statewide in 2019. The agency will continue to gather feedback from stakeholders around the state throughout the entire developmental process. The tables on the following show the extent to which stakeholder input will be gathered, the timing of gathering input, and how stakeholder participation will increase as the process continues. HB 22 also calls for the study of the feasibility of using extracurricular and cocurricular indicators in accountability; communication related to that initiative will be forthcoming.