June 15, 2000

TO THE SUPERINTENDENT ADDRESSED:

Enclosed are 2000 Accountability Data Tables (Part I) for your district and campuses. Also enclosed, if applicable, is a list of schools in your district to be evaluated under the alternative education procedures for the 2000 ratings cycle, and notification of excessive under-reported leavers. Information on each of these enclosures follows.

Accountability Data Tables (Part I) showing attendance rates, dropout rates, college admissions testing results, TAAS/TASP equivalency rates, and percent of students completing the Recommended High School Program or Distinguished Achievement Program are enclosed. These data, in conjunction with results of the TAAS testing which you will receive separately as Part II from the test contractor (National Computer Systems), will be used to determine the 2000 accountability ratings and acknowledgments for districts and campuses. Complete data tables will be provided to you with your ratings on August 17.

A partial data table for your district and two copies of the partial data tables for each campus in your district are enclosed. One campus table is provided for district use and the second for campus use. Consult your 2000 Accountability Manual for instructions on how to determine accountability ratings for districts and schools for this year. Table 1 on page 16 of the Manual provides a summary table of the rating standards for 2000. Table 3 on page 35 provides the standards for additional acknowledgment. Section IX — Using the 2000 Accountability Data Tables should also be useful in interpreting the information contained in the data tables. The 2000 Accountability Manual is available through the Texas Education Agency website at:

Regarding the information contained in the data tables, please note the following:

Spring 2000 and Spring 1999 TAAS Results. Around the same time as this mailing from TEA, you will receive spring 2000 and spring 1999 TAAS results for reading, mathematics, and writing from the test contractor. The results, labeled "2000 Accountability Data Table - Part II", will be summed across grades. These are the TAAS results that will be evaluated to determine 2000 accountability ratings.

These results differ from the TAAS Summary Reports you have already received and reflect the following:

they include grades 3 through 6 results for Spanish test takers;

they exclude the performance of students who were not enrolled in the district as of the PEIMS fall "snapshot" date (see page 17 of the Manual); and

they include – as takers and passers of the reading, mathematics, and writing tests – credit for grade 10 students who met the testing requirement for graduation by passing the appropriate end-of-course examinations and did not take any exit-level TAAS test in the spring of their sophomore year.

Analysis Group Marker. On the Part I tables, an "X" to the left of the Student Groups label (All Students, African American, Hispanic, White, Economically Disadvantaged) indicates that performance results for that group will be used to determine the accountability rating. If no "X" is printed, then the minimum size criteria were not met and performance results for that group are not used to determine the accountability rating. The minimum size requirements for student groups are defined on pages 23-24 of the 2000 Accountability Manual.

Additional Acknowledgment. Campuses can receive additional acknowledgment for any of the following: College Admissions Tests results, TAAS/TASP Equivalency, Recommended High School Program, Comparable Improvement in Mathematics, or Comparable Improvement in Reading. The results for College Admissions Tests, TAAS/TASP Equivalency, and Recommended High School Program are provided in the enclosed tables. The data for Comparable Improvement will not be available until ratings are released in mid-August, when notification of additional acknowledgment on all five of these indicators will occur. Details on the calculation of Comparable Improvement are provided in Section V – 2000 Campus Comparable Improvement in the 2000 Accountability Manual. Standards for additional acknowledgment are provided in Table 3 on page 35 of the Manual.

Be aware that your data tables may be confidential if five or fewer dropouts (Part I) are reported. The usual masking procedures for small numbers were not invoked for the Part I data report.

Alternative Education Schools. Data tables have been included for all schools in the district, including those that applied for optional evaluation as alternative education (AE) schools. Ratings for AE schools will be released in mid-August along with the ratings for all other schools. Note that data from all schools in a district are used in the determination of the district accountability rating.

If applicable, accompanying this letter is a list of the schools in your district approved for optional evaluation as AE schools in 2000. Please review this list to ensure that no traditional instruction schools that should be evaluated under the standard accountability system have inadvertently been coded as an AE school. If you find an error in this list, please contact the Division of Accountability Development and Support at (512) 463-9642 as soon as possible. This review is an opportunity to correct a coding error prior to the ratings release, it is not an opportunity to change a previously selected evaluation option.

Under-reported Leavers. Districts are required, as part of their fall data submission to the Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS), to report the status of all students enrolled in the district in the prior year in grades 7–12. Agency staff compared 1999-2000 school district enrollment and leaver information to 1998-99 enrollment and attendance collections in order to assess whether all of last year’s grade 7–12 students had been accounted for by each school district in the state. This analysis yielded three types of information: (1) students for whom enrollment or leaver records were expected and received; (2) students for whom enrollment or leaver records were expected but NOT received (under-reported students); and (3) students for whom no leaver record was expected but one was received (over-reported leavers). Summaries of this information for all districts in the state are available on the TEA website at the following address:

There are accountability consequences for under-reporting students. For the 2000 rating cycle, any district that exceeds a specified threshold for accuracy in reporting the status of their prior year grade 7-12 students cannot be rated Exemplary or Recognized. These thresholds are:

These rating consequences will not apply to the 2000 accountability ratings for districts with fewer than five under-reported students for the 1998-99 school year. Detailed information on this issue was provided in a letter to all district superintendents dated June 1, 2000. A copy of this letter is available on the agency’s website. If you are one of the districts that exceeded the threshold, this will be noted on the enclosed district data table.

If you have questions about these materials, please contact the appropriate division of the Texas Education Agency as follows:

A MS Word Version of this letter is available for download.

For further information on this topic, please contact the division of Performance Reporting at TEA (512)463-9704

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