How did Fort Worth schools achieve higher letter grades after a disruptive pandemic?

Teachers and staff across Fort Worth ISD are starting the new year with optimism after receiving accountability ratings from the state that show that despite two years of constant disruption, teacher vacancies and waves of COVID-19, they improved in state ratings at campuses and the district level.

Teachers and district leaders hope the recognition is a bellwether for continued growth and progress, after low reading scores dogged the district for years.

“I think it is showing the community, the families, everyone that the work we put in has been paying off,” said Miranda Quintero, a school librarian at Morningside Elementary. “We’ve been showing up, we have been pushing even in the face of adversity, we have been going, going, going and it is making a difference.”

Extra tutoring, Saturday learning programs and summer school were among the initiatives implemented by the district, in addition to intervention programs designed to target low literacy scores.

Tobi Jackson, the president of the Fort Worth School Board, said the scores have been a long time in the making.

“The scores did not occur over one year,” she told the Star-Telegram. “The scores are the culmination of our entire employee base, parent base and student base over multiple years. This is the result of consistent hard work academically, physically and emotionally.”

Superintendent Kent Scribner noted that the district has seen a 14-point increase in its overall rating since the beginning of high-stakes testing. Scribner, who announced his retirement earlier this year, said he wants to finish strong as he wraps up his seventh year in the district and 20th year as a school superintendent.

Scribner noted that a large majority — 86% — of the district’s students are economically disadvantaged, meaning their families were likely to be hit hardest by the economic impact of the pandemic. The scores show that the district’s recovery strategies, including extended school days, Saturday schools and summer learning opportunities, paid dividends for those students, Scribner said.

Jerry Moore, the district’s chief of schools, said the outcomes reflect the progress students have made since returning to class in person after COVID shutdowns. Moore said he was most pleased to see more A- and B-rated campuses in this year’s ratings. Those outcomes are a testament to the work teachers have done over the past two years, he said.

Moore said the challenge would be sustaining that progress. Students in the district need to continue to grow, he said.

“It’s not necessarily where we want to be, you know, we still have room to grow,” he said. “But I think it’s pointing us in the right direction.”

Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker said the scores were a sign that Fort Worth ISD is a strong district. It will take the entire community to make sure students and families feel supported, she said. She offered congratulations to the teachers and administrators in the district who persevered during a difficult year and helped students move closer to where they needed to be. The return to in-person learning after school shutdowns left teachers with a difficult job, she said.

“You can imagine being a teacher in a classroom, with students who hadn’t seen a teacher in person in over a year, getting them back up to speed was really difficult,” she said.

Fort Worth district one of five to increase letter grade

Fort Worth ISD broke out in Tarrant County as one of five districts to improve a letter grade, increasing the number of A and B schools from 41 in 2019 to 75 in 2022 and decreasing the number of D and F schools (not rated this year under a 2021 law) from 38 to 23.

Both academic growth, measuring how many students progressed from one year to the next. and student achievement, measuring how many students are performing on grade level, go into the letter grades that schools and districts get from the Texas Education Agency, among other factors.

Academic growth buoyed the scores at many schools, including Morningside, where student achievement was not scored. A 2021 law exempts campuses from receiving D or F scores to allow for one more year of recovery before possible sanctions for low-performing campuses go back into effect.

The metric is significant, Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath said during a press call discussing the release of the numbers, because high academic growth can quickly turn into high academic achievement.

“Ultimately, if you have really low levels of achievement at a campus, and for several years in a row, you have very high levels of academic growth at that campus, you will not end up with low levels of achievement at that campus,” he said.

That growth was seen in districts across the state, Morath said, with 25% of districts and 33% of campuses increasing letter grades since 2019.

“Don’t get me wrong, we still have recovery work to do from the pandemic,” he said. “But the A-F system is designed to give a holistic picture of the performance of the school, and what we’ve seen is that our educators all over the state of Texas have stepped up remarkably to give our kids the absolute best during this time.”

Now, district leaders are looking for ways to continue improving and sustaining the gains they have made beyond this moment.

“We always consider that sustainability is much more challenging than attainment initially,” Jackson, the Fort Worth board president, said.

Your school has a grade. Now what?

Now that grades are out for the first time since 2019, parents and school district leaders can use the data behind the scores to make important decisions about where to focus — and for some parents, where to send their children to school.

In-depth information on demographic groups, the number and skill level of teachers as well as the details behind each letter grade can be found at txschools.gov.

Commissioner Morath said as a parent, he looks at the scores to advocate for his children’s school to do better and evaluate whether the school is the best fit for his kid.

“If you are working with your school leaders and you see them making real progress, and making appropriate moves, that’s a great situation to be in,” he said. “Sometimes you don’t see that. And so then I think parents have a choice to make in terms of how to best support their kids and their kids’ academic growth.”

Jackson said that parents should trust their gut and evaluate a host of factors when looking at where their kids should got to school.

“The letter grade is important; however, there are many other factors,” she said. “School climate, your child’s individual progress, the faculty and administration’s accessibility, how welcome you feel on the campus and most importantly: is your child excited to attend school?”

Parents can also volunteer on campus to be a part of the learning process and evaluate the school. Parent engagement has been key in getting to the letter grades released Monday, campus staff told the Star-Telegram.

Teresa Guardiola, the school librarian at De Zavala Elementary School, which was upgraded to an A from a B Monday, said that parents, teachers and most importantly the kids worked toward learning goals.

“The achievement the campus made required everyone’s support and buy-in,” she said.

Guardiola, who worried about student achievement as schools returned to in-person learning after the pandemic, said the hard work of teachers and even more so students led to De Zavala being upgraded from a B to an A campus, one of 19 A-rated campuses across the district as of Monday.

“De Zavala scored an A rating because almost every teacher tutored after school for months to help kids who needed extra instruction and the entire campus was laser focused every day telling kids to strive harder, read more, push themselves, think harder and level up,” she said. ““This year, our focus is to keep it up and move that mark even more.”