House Bill (HB) 22 established Local Accountability Systems (LAS) which allow districts to develop plans to locally evaluate their campuses. Austin ISD is one of 20 districts selected by the Texas Education Agency to participate in the LAS pilot project.  This pilot program will inform the full roll out of the local accountability system option for the 2018–19 academic year.  

Starting in August of 2018, districts may use TEA-approved locally developed domains in conjunction with the three state-mandated domains to assign overall A–F ratings for each of its eligible campuses. The rating earned on the local domains may contribute up to 50 percent of a campus’s overall rating. Local domains apply to campuses only, not districts, and a campus must earn at least a C on the state-mandated system to be eligible for inclusion of local domains.

Representatives from the 20 pilot districts have been meeting with TEA staff and consultants from the American Institute for Research (AIR) to develop the LAS framework.  Districts will be able to define components and metrics to evaluate their campuses in up to four local domains: Academics, Extra-Curricular, Future Ready Learners, and Culture and Climate.  Local plans must be submitted to TEA for approval. In addition, the commissioner has defined guidelines. For example, a district may choose to limit participation in the LAS to a selected school type, i.e. elementary, middle or high schools, but once the school type has been selected, all schools within the same school type must be evaluated on the same plan and on the same targets.

The components of local plans must be reliable, auditable, and provide for differentiation of letter grades. Reliable means that the data is consistent and that it could be collected again and show comparable results, auditable means that the indicators must hold up to official examination and verification of records, and differentiation of letter grades means that not everyone should get an automatic A on the indicator. In addition, indicators cannot be the same as those used for state accountability domains, which means the following indicators are excluded from consideration:  STAAR performance and progress, TELPAS progress, graduation rates, AP/IP assessments, dual credits, CTE, military enlistment, OnRamps, and ACT/SAT/TSIA.

The district has collected feedback on possible LAS indicators from the AISD community (principals and campus staff, CACs, DACs, and central office staff) and evaluated a variety of metrics currently used by the district to evaluate campuses, such as the indicators used for Community and Student Engagement ratings and the Strategic Plan Scorecard. Click here to view the proposed 2018 Pilot Local Accountability System Indicators.

Timeline and summary of LAS development: