KBTX-TV in Bryan-College Station recently interviewed College Station Superintendent Clark Ealy and Huntsville ISD Superintendent Howell Wright about their participation in the Texas Performance Assessment Consortium (TPAC), a TASA initiative focused on building and supporting next-generation measures and assessments in support of community-based accountability systems.
College Station and Huntsville ISDs are among 44 school districts participating in TPAC. Their goal is to demonstrate that a well-crafted community-based accountability system has the necessary explanatory power to clearly communicate the quality of effort undertaken by a school and a district such that it can eventually supplant the standardized test-centric system in place in Texas for more than 20 years.
During the past few years, through the work of the Texas High Performance Consortium, the idea of community-based accountability systems has grown. A number of Texas districts are now experimenting with various models.