Published: October 29, 2009 12:42 am      

Commerce ISD now rated 'Academically Acceptable'

COMMERCE — Administrators with the Commerce Indepedent School District received word from the Texas Education Agency Wednesday morning that the district will now be rated as “Academically Acceptable” for the 2008-09 school year following an appeal filed in July.

“We are excited that the TEA agreed with out appeal,” said CISD Superintendent Blake Cooper. “We want to get the word out that the rating had nothing to do with the academic gains that have been made or the performance of our students and teachers.”

The TEA accountability ratings for the 2008-09 school year were released on July 31, during which time Commerce ISD was assigned an “Academically Unacceptable” rating due to a coding error in which one student was enrolled at two campuses at the beginning of the school year. The coding issue caused the district to exceed the acceptable dropout rate.

School districts and campuses can be rated “Exemplary”, “Recognized”, “Academically Acceptable” and “Academically Unacceptable”.

The purpose of the TEA’s accountability rating system is to evaluate how well districts are educating students. The primary criteria for evaluating districts and campuses are student performance on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) exams, dropout rates and completion rates.

“It was a clerical error with our PIEMS coding. We have identified the problem and corrected it.” said Cooper. “We are not where we want to be with the ‘Academically Acceptable’ rating, but it is important for us to lose the ‘Academically Unacceptable’ rating. We want to be the premier district in the region.”