Under New TEA Requirements, Austin ISD Meetings Are Flying By

The Austin ISD Board of Trustees' meetings have included a lot of talk over the last several weeks about two concepts: Lone Star Governance and student outcomes. The new focus is changing how the board conducts its public meetings, most noticeably by shortening them.

The board's Dec. 7 meeting lasted one hour and 25 minutes, half or even a third of the length of past meetings. Trustees refrained from their usual practice of asking detailed questions after presentations. They offered little discussion. Through it all, there was the pervasive sense that the process was being scrutinized by unseen eyes.

Lone Star Governance is one of the centerpieces of the deal AISD cut with the Texas Education Agency in September to keep the state from taking over the district's special education services. It's a system of management for school boards created by TEA and it comes with its own language, one term of which is "student outcomes," defined by TEA as a measurement of what students know or can do. Student outcomes can be measured by any district-approved assessment but for practical purposes they refer to how students perform on high-stakes standardized tests like STAAR and MAP.

In its TEA deal, the board pledged to focus at least 50% of its time during public meetings on student outcomes. The Dec. 7 meeting was the first at which the change was so noticeable. The board received a report from Chief Financial Officer Eduardo Ramos on the financial condition of the district, and Trustee Kevin Foster, who led the meeting, said the board had 30 minutes to discuss it. Ordinarily, Ramos would have begun speaking. Instead, Interim Superintendent Matias Segura told the audience that Ramos' presentation could be seen in a video available on BoardDocs, the district's webpage for items related to its agenda. Ramos wound up saying nothing. The 30-minute discussion was over in less than three minutes. "I want to take credit for running a snappy meeting," Foster said.

Later, the board jumped into a review of changes to the district's scorecard – the document setting out its top five priorities and pairing them with measurable goals – required by Lone Star Governance. The LSG rules have required the district to drop two of its five goals – those relating to special education students and students in sixth through eighth grades, leaving only the state-mandated goals concerning third-grade literacy and numeracy and graduates' college and career readiness.

Foster asked Jacob Reach, chief of board services, to explain the value of examining the performance of individual groups like African Americans, Hispanics, and other groups. Reach replied that assessments of economically disadvantaged third-graders showed that the district needs to work harder for these groups. "I think if we're being honest as a district, we may not be serving those students well," Reach said. "By calling it out, we're not only ensuring that we're focusing on all students and all students are getting a quality education, but we're also saying, 'Hey, these groups are very important to us and we have not done enough to support them.'"

Foster agreed and also offered an optimistic take on the changes thus far. "It's really forced us to look at what our values are and really forced us to think through our procedures," Foster said. "And one of the things that's happening with our procedures is we're becoming quicker in our cadence. As this meeting demonstrates, some good things are happening."