According to Texas Tribune, schools with predominantly Black student populations in Texas receive more F grades than A grades under the state's school ranking system, forcing many parents to find alternatives for their children. This outcome did not appear from nowhere. It is a direct product of a mechanism that the Texas Education Agency (TEA) itself changed in the middle of the game, then given the green light by the state's highest court just days before the new school year began.
Transparency only has value when standards are known beforehand, not when the state rewrites the measure after the school year has passed.
A Scoring System That Changed the Rules Mid-Game
Texas's A-F rating system was established in 2017 to evaluate schools and districts based on standardized test scores and students' college readiness levels. The problem emerged in 2023, when rating standards were raised to achieve higher scores, but were applied retroactively to the previous school year, meaning schools were measured against a standard they had no knowledge of before the school year started, according to KERA News. More than 120 school districts in Texas sued TEA, arguing the agency failed to provide adequate notice before changing the scoring method, and a Travis County judge blocked the release of 2023 scores immediately after the lawsuit was filed.
Everything reversed last week. Texas Court of Appeals, 14th District, overturned the Travis County judge's decision, allowing TEA to release 2023 scores, on the grounds that state education law does not specify an exact deadline for issuing ranking standards, thereby giving the agency broad discretion over when to apply them. This is not merely a dry legal detail. It is the mechanism that allows an administrative agency to set the rules after the game has ended, then use those results to decide which schools are deemed failures.
Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick welcomed the ruling, calling the A-F system one of the best tools for creating competition and excellence, while TEA spokesman Jake Kobersky said the ruling restored a transparent lens for examining district and school performance in 2023. However, transparency does not equate to fairness. If standards are tightened and applied retroactively, schools that already lacked resources to adapt quickly—often those with high percentages of Black students—will bear the heaviest burden, exactly as the data Texas Tribune documented shows.
From F Grades to Lost Autonomy: The Houston ISD Lesson
Texas's A-F ranking story cannot be separated from a precedent that already shocked the system: in 2023, TEA took over Houston ISD, the state's largest school district, after a high school received consecutive failure ratings. TEA removed the elected board of trustees and installed Mike Miles as state-appointed superintendent, according to KERA News. That mechanism shows A-F scores are not merely a number posted on a school gate. It is the legal basis for the state to strip a school district of its autonomy, and Houston, home to a substantial Vietnamese-American community scattered across areas like Alief and near Bellaire Boulevard, is precisely where that precedent became reality.
Notably, this system stopped releasing ratings in 2019 due to COVID-19 and ongoing lawsuits, and even 2024 results are currently blocked by a Travis County judge due to another lawsuit involving a new standardized test scoring computer system, according to KERA News. In other words, Texas parents for years in a row had no clear idea how their child's school was officially rated, until courts decided to unlock data caches one at a time, each at a different point in time.
Vouchers Are Not a Way Out for Every Family
While the legal battle over scores continues, the state has opened another escape route: a $1 billion private school scholarship program (voucher), one of the largest in the country, according to a report from the Texas State Auditor's Office cited by Houston Public Media. More than 85,000 families received invitations to participate in the first year, while over 121,000 other students remain on the waiting list.
However, data on who actually uses the program tells a different story from the expectation that vouchers would be an escape route for families with children in low-rated schools. According to Houston Public Media, roughly 41% of students in the voucher program are white, compared to just 24% of white students in the entire public school system; Black students make up 14% of voucher participants, nearly matching the 13% rate in public schools. In other words, white students are using the program far beyond their population share in the public system, while Black students—the group that Texas Tribune identified as bearing the highest rate of F grades—are not participating proportionally to access vouchers.
A plausible explanation lies in the program's financial structure itself: most participating families receive roughly $10,500 per year, a sum often insufficient to cover tuition at reputable private schools in major urban areas, where actual tuition runs much higher. Students with disabilities receive priority access to up to $30,000 per year and comprise about 24% of participants, while homeschooling families receive a maximum of $2,000. State Senator Sarah Eckhardt, a Democrat running for State Auditor, called this first report evidence that the program is a multibillion-dollar subsidy for exclusive private schools concentrated in major urban areas, while public schools in many other places lack budgets and are forced to close. This is the view of an opposing candidate, not a neutral conclusion, but the racial composition numbers in the report are data released by the State Auditor's Office and cannot be easily dismissed.
Curriculum Change Comes at the Exact Moment Racial Data Emerges
Parallel to the battle over scores, the Texas State Board of Education, controlled by a Republican majority, temporarily approved a new social studies curriculum statewide that removes standards requiring students to analyze the impact of race and ethnicity on society, as well as how minority groups were treated differently in history, according to prior reporting by Saigon Sentinel. The new curriculum also completely eliminates world cultures from sixth grade and narrows history beyond European traditions, affecting approximately 5.4 million students from kindergarten through twelfth grade.
The timing coincidence is worth considering. Just as ranking data shows schools with large Black student populations bearing an unusually high rate of F grades, the tool for students to analyze the social and historical causes of those gaps is being stripped from the official curriculum. No source indicates these two policies were designed to coordinate with each other, but the practical consequence is that Texas students have increasingly fewer official frameworks to understand why their school received a low rating, while the state uses those very scores to decide the administrative fate of schools.
Back-to-School Season Brings Multiple Worries at Once
For many Vietnamese-American families in Houston, an area with dense Vietnamese population around school districts like Alief and Spring Branch, the first weeks of August are not just about deciding whether children attend public, private, or voucher schools. It is also when parents must weigh what should and should not be posted on social media on the first day of school. The San Antonio Police Department recently warned that signs with school names, teacher names, or bus stop locations could help predators identify where a child typically appears during the week. Greg Schiller, executive director of the Child Rescue Coalition, added that current AI technology can create fake sexual images from publicly posted photos of children, and recommended parents only show the back of their child's head or cover the face with a heart shape.
Two stories that seem separate—one about school rankings, one about online safety—actually reflect a single reality: back-to-school season in Texas this year demands that parents make more complex decisions than usual, from choosing schools to protecting children online, while official information to make those decisions, whether ranking scores or privacy policies, arrives late or remains unclear.
Not Transparency, but Delayed Self-Determination
The Texas Court of Appeals, 14th District ruling will be presented by TEA and Texas conservatives as a victory for transparency. But transparency only has value when standards are known beforehand, not when the state has the power to rewrite the measure after the school year has passed and then announce results as fait accompli. With such a mechanism, schools with large Black student populations, often also schools lacking resources to react quickly to new standards, will continue to bear the largest disadvantage each time the state changes the rules of the game.
The voucher program, though promoted as a way out for families stuck in low-rated schools, has so far failed to prove it serves the student group bearing the highest rate of F grades. If this trend continues, the real question is no longer which schools receive F grades, but who has the money and information to leave the system before being evaluated, and who is forced to remain and bear the consequences of standards written after the game has already begun.
Read the original reports at the source links below.
Bảo Nguyễn
Bảo Nguyễn founded Saigon Sentinel to give the Vietnamese diaspora truly independent, in-depth community coverage at a time when misinformation moves faster than fact-checks and the language barrier makes verification harder than it should be. He sets the editorial standards and quality controls that govern the reporting, chooses the subjects, writes and edits each article, reads it against its sources before publication, audits published output, and handles corrections.