Texas families are days away from their first look at how every public school and district in the state performed this past year. The Texas Education Agency plans to release the 2026 A-F accountability ratings this Friday: according to the agency’s 2026 Accountability Rating System page, “Information and resources related to the release of 2026 ratings will be available on August 14, 2026, at 12 p.m.”
The grades — a letter from A to F for roughly 1,200 school districts and more than 9,000 campuses — will post on TXschools.gov, the state’s school-lookup site. The ratings matter because they are the state’s main public measure of whether schools are setting kids up for success — and for two years, families could not see them at all.
Lawsuits filed by school districts blocked the 2023 and 2024 ratings from public view until an appeals court cleared the way, and the agency released the 2025 ratings on Aug. 15, 2025, alongside the delayed 2024 grades — a release TEA said “reestablishes critical transparency for Texas families” after what it called two years of lawsuit-induced delays. Friday’s release would make 2026 the second consecutive on-time year.
Texas Education Code Section 39.054 requires performance ratings to be made publicly available no later than Aug. 15 each year, along with the number of consecutive school years each district and campus has spent at an unacceptable rating — the tally that can eventually trigger state intervention. This year Aug. 15 falls on a Saturday; TEA’s posted schedule puts the release machinery in motion at noon the day before.
That intervention can be dramatic. Under Texas Education Code Section 39A.111, if a single campus receives an unacceptable rating for five consecutive school years, the commissioner of education must order one of two remedies: close that campus, or replace the district’s entire elected school board with a state-appointed board of managers — a state takeover.
That is the provision behind the 2023 takeover of Houston ISD, the largest district in the state, and the process TEA laid out for Fort Worth ISD when it appointed a board of managers there in March. TEA’s lists appointed boards and new superintendents for three more districts this year — Lake Worth ISD in April, Beaumont ISD in April and Connally ISD in May.
The A-F system was created in 2017 by House Bill 22, passed by the 85th Legislature. It grades schools in three areas: Student Achievement, which measures how students score; School Progress, which measures how much students improve year over year; and Closing the Gaps, which measures how well schools serve low-income students and other student groups. The grades rest heavily on the STAAR exam, however, and this will be the last year it is the state’s standardized test.
Some of the data is already partly visible. TEA released spring 2026 STAAR results for grades 3-8 on June 15 and end-of-course results on June 10, reporting gains on all end-of-course assessments. The science numbers, which The Texas Dispatch reported in detail when they posted July 31, were mixed but improving: 36% of fifth graders met grade level in science, up from 29% in 2025 but still below the 49% of 2019, while 54% of eighth graders met grade level, up from 46% and above the pre-pandemic mark. Whether those testing gains translate into better letter grades campus by campus is the central question Friday answers.
Of the 1,208 districts and 9,084 campuses rated in 2025, 24% of districts and 31% of campuses improved their letter grade compared with 2024, 15% of campuses declined, and 43% of high-poverty campuses earned an A or B — a figure TEA cited as proof that “demographics do not equal destiny.” “Today marks a return to clarity and accountability,” Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath said in announcing last year’s ratings.
Districts have been preparing for the moment. TEA posted A-F results-sharing presentation templates for district and school leaders on July 30 and maintains a communications toolkit of parent letters, FAQs and social media materials so schools can explain their grades to families in English and Spanish.
When the grades post Friday at noon, the sharpest attention will be in board rooms: school districts and the elected trustees who govern them get the state’s annual answer on how they are doing — and for any campus already carrying a string of failing years, the consecutive-year count published alongside the letter grades will show exactly how close the state has come to stepping in.