SAN ANTONIO -- The San Antonio ISD received its 2018 accountability ratings from the Texas Education Agency on Wednesday.
The district made significant progress with gains across all grade levels.
"San Antonio ISD is one of the fatest improving districts in the state," said Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath.
SAISD met standard in each of the three domains of the ratings system. This year, the state also gave grades to each district in the state. Overall, the SAISD received a grade of C.
"We are not satisfied with that of course, that is not where we want to be. But one of the thing we want to make sure that families and communities know that we are making signification gains are we are going in the right direction and we want to applaud our staff because it is their work that delivered these results," said SAISD superintendent Pedro Martinez
Thirty-four SAISD campuses earned one or more distinction designations from the TEA based on student performance, up from 29 schools the past year.
Under the new 2018 accountability system, the district has also shown significant improvement in turning around more schools. TEA has provided data that shows that if the 2018 accountability system had been applied to 2017 data, then in 2017 SAISD would have had 35 improved required schools, compared to 16 in 2018.
With the new TEA grading system, Martinez thinks teachers are going to be held accountable to improve learning in the classrooms.
"This system is going to give justice to what teachers are doing. Does it mean we are where we need to be? Absolutely not. But keep in mind our school district was low performing for many decades and many in the community know that. So now what they are seeing is significant gains and very excellerated. And that's going to continue to happen," said Martinez.
Under that comparison, SAISD decreased the number of students enrolled in a low performing school by about two-thirds, which shows the largest percent decrease among urban school districts in the state (47 percent down to 16 percent).