MISD ERP Honor Roll Debunk

Apropos of the2018-2024 STAAR Data Analysis, McKinney ISD communications posted a news release on March 25, 2025 proclaiming MISD,

“Proudly Recognized as a 2024 Honor Roll District.”

 The subtitle states,

“McKinney ISD Named To The 2024 Educational Results Partnership (ERP) Honor Roll List Of Top-Performing School Districts In Texas.”

The text of the news release is included below.

But just like the way the MISD administration compares its STAAR results to state and regional numbers to make them look better, we need to look more closely at what the ERP is actually looking at for its honor roll award. The Texas Honor Roll Methodology is also included below. In the state of Texas, schools are broken down into two major categories:

• STAR Schools and Districts: Schools and districts with greater than, or equal to, 33 percent of students designated as economically disadvantaged (high poverty).

• Scholar Schools and Districts: Schools and districts with fewer than 33 percent of students designated as economically disadvantaged (low poverty).

With its high percentage of Economically Disadvantaged students, MISD falls into the STAR classification. So it is compared with all other school districts in Texas with 33% or more Economically Disadvantaged students. To be recognized as an Honor Roll School (Distrrict), a school (district) must outperform in the core subjects of Math and English, other schools (districts) that are like them both socioeconomically and demographically. 

In that group, to make the Honor Roll, a district must have comprehensively performed above the mean (trendline) at least 80% of the time for all cohorts of students served and for all grade levels served. Just what is that mean? Well, it turns out it’s a pretty low bar, because we can see from the data that less than half MISD’s African-American, Hispanic and Economically Disadvantaged students perform at 'meets grade level' but they still beat the state mean (see the Texas Education Agency 2023-24 STAAR Performance (TAPR) for the state, below).

It’s pretty sad that the academic performance in Texas is so low that MISD can get on an Honor Roll with these groups of students performing at grade level less than half of the time. It’s also sad that the MISD board and administration want the public to think that they are doing a good job for our students when they really aren’t.