Two of the biggest tests of Texas public education policy arrive within weeks of each other this August, and together they will frame how the state judges its schools heading into the 2027 legislative session. By Aug. 15, under state law, the Texas Education Agency must release its 2026 A-F accountability ratings — the annual letter grades assigned to every public school and district.
At almost the same moment, more than 100,000 students will begin the first school year funded by the state’s new education savings accounts, the largest launch of a private-education subsidy in the country’s history.
The accountability ratings are the clearer of the two yardsticks. Grades A through F rest heavily on how students perform on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, the STAAR exam. The agency released Spring 2026 STAAR results for grades 3 through 8 on June 16 and its end-of-course results on June 10, and it posted the final administration reports that feed the ratings on July 28, according to the agency’s 2026 accountability schedule.
A clean, on-time release would mark the second straight year the ratings have landed without a courtroom detour. TEA released its 2024 and 2025 ratings together in mid-August 2025 only after litigation from school districts had frozen earlier grades, a fight over how the agency raised the bar for an “A.”.
The second measure is newer and harder to score. The Texas Education Freedom Account program, created by Senate Bill 2 in the 89th Legislature, lets families spend state money on private-school tuition, tutoring, therapy and home-school materials. The comptroller’s office, which runs the program, reported in June that it had passed 100,000 awards drawn from more than 274,000 applications. The standard account is worth $10,474 for 2026-27, with up to $30,000 for students with disabilities and $2,000 for home-schoolers, according to TEA. The awards commit roughly $1 billion in state funds in the program’s first year.
Supporters cast the program as a long-sought expansion of choice for families whose public schools were not working for their children, and they argue the A-F ratings exist for the same reason: to show parents plainly whether a campus is setting students up to succeed.
Critics, including district superintendents and the Texas American Federation of Teachers, counter that the $1 billion leaves traditional public schools with less as enrollment-based funding follows students out the door, and they question grading campuses so heavily on a single standardized test.
Both threads will run straight into the Legislature. The Texas House Public Education Committee, chaired by Rep. Brad Buckley of Salado, has scheduled interim hearings for Aug. 12 and 13 where lawmakers are expected to press TEA on how it is carrying out the 89th Legislature’s education overhaul — the choice program, the school-finance changes and the cellphone restrictions in House Bill 1481. Commissioner Mike Morath’s agency will answer for the ratings and the rollout alike.
Within three weeks, Texans will have both a fresh report card on their public schools and the first real-world data on a choice program its architects called historic.