Fort Worth, Plano ISDs join lawsuit against Education Commissioner Mike Morath's new grading rubric

More North Texas school districts have joined the fight against the Texas Education Agency’s new criteria for grading Texas schools.  

The state’s new plan could turn A schools into C schools and is retroactive from the last school year.   

Fort Worth ISD became the latest school district to join a lawsuit against Mike Morath, as commissioner of the Texas Education Agency. The districts are claiming his new method for grading schools is unfair to schools by significantly dropping their campus grades despite an increase in test scores. 

"How do you tell a student, last week, getting a 90% is an A.  This week you did better, but actually got a B or C," said Angelica Ramsey, superintendent, Fort Worth ISD.

Plano ISD also met Tuesday to debate joining the lawsuit which is really the only method for school districts to try to stop it.   

So far, nearly 60 school districts across Texas including Dallas, Crowley, Frisco, Prosper, and Red Oak have joined forces to say TEA’s method of grading them without giving them the parameters is unfair.

"The state said we're going to change the accountability system but we're not going to tell you what it is, and we're not going to tell you after the school year.  We want to improve but we need to know what the goalposts are," said Ramsey.

Education Commissioner Mike Morath spoke at the Dallas Chamber’s State of Education conference in Dallas Tuesday where two of the superintendents now suing him were also speaking. He brought up the benefits of the accountability system overall but not the changes and left the stage before the superintendents walked up to speak.

NBC 5 spoke to Morath earlier this summer about the new grading system and he insisted superintendents supported the idea of bigger changes every five years rather than small yearly ones.

"Let's do all the changes at one time, then you have one year where you have this 'what if' concept, where you communicate about and then otherwise everybody can still compare your performance pretty effectively," said Morath.

But district leaders said that’s not true, and under no circumstance should A schools become C schools and C schools now be labeled failing with no drop in performance.

"I would never have any evaluation of any member of my team based on previous evaluation criteria, and at the end of the period of time that I'm going to evaluate them ... change my mind, I'm going to evaluate you on something else," said Stephanie Elizalde, superintendent, Dallas ISD.

The state grading system designed to make it easy for parents to keep track of how well their child’s school is performing … is proving to be significantly complicated.

More districts are expected to join the suit, but so far Morath has given no sign of backing down from the changes.