The Texas Education Agency (TEA) recently announced that during the 2012-13 school year (the most recent year of the rating) Texas’ traditional public schools outperformed charter schools in both academic and financial measurements.
That’s good news for Lamar County, where there are four public school districts, but no charter schools.
Academically, under the 2014 TEA Accountability System, 92.6% of traditional ISDs met standard, while 7.4% did not. Compared to charter schools where only 77.7% met standard, while 17.3% did not. That’s almost 1 out of 5 charter schools that failed to meet the state’s academic standards.
Financially, charter schools are not stacking up either. The Financial Integrity Rating System of Texas (FIRST) measures and rates how schools are managing their financial resources.
According to the TEA, the FIRST rating uses 20 “established financial indicators, such as operating expenditures for instruction, tax collection rates, student-teacher ratios, and long-term debt.” Out of the Traditional ISDs in Texas 89% ranked “superior” and 1.2% ranked “substandard.” But the Charter schools only 37% ranked “superior” and 20% ranked “substandard.” That means 1 out of 5 charter schools ranked “substandard” on how they spend the tax dollars supporting them, while almost 9 out of 10 ISDs ranked “superior”.
The complete reports can be found on the TEA website:
http://www.tea.state.tx.us/news_release.aspx?id=25769816307
http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/perfreport/account/2014/statesummary.html