The Texas Education Agency (TEA) came out with its yearly School Report Cards for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years on January 16. According to the TEA, this report measures how much students in each grade level are learning, and whether or not they are considered ready for the next grade level. This report also helps show how well a school prepares its students for success after high school in college, the workforce, or the military.
“Bowie was rated as an A campus, and that is traditionally where we tend to fall in line,” Academic Director Kaylin Brett said. “A few years ago, we did have a B, but we fixed a lot of things and created new systems to bring our school back up to an A. This score just helps reiterate that Bowie is a high-performing school, and we have high expectations not just for our students, but our parents also push us to be a great school.”
According to TEA, the overall grades are based on the school’s performance in three different areas: School Progress, Closing the Gaps, and Student Achievement, with Bowie getting a 93 out of 100 in every category except for School Progress, which got an 84. School Progress is defined as how much better students are doing compared to last year. Closing the Gap is analyzed by TEA, with them considering if there is a performance gap among different groups of students, and Student Achievement is just based on how much students know.
“It’s cool that our school got an A,” freshman Luke Etheridge said. “I think we got this score because we have good teachers and a lot of smart kids go here.”
When TEA is analyzing a school’s progress, they measure two things: Academic Growth and Relative Performance. Academic Growth is an analysis of how much students grow by at least one school year, and Relative Performance is how students at one school compare performance-wise on STAAR tests to another school. Bowie scored a 77 on Academic Growth and got an 84 on Relative Performance.
“Students at Bowie take testing pretty seriously because they start to think about college early on,” sophomore Sam Norton said. “Around sophomore year rank comes out, GPA starts to matter and scholarship opportunities start to open up which I think causes people to care more about STAAR and other tests.”
According to Brett, Bowie has increased their score in the Closing the Gap category. In this area, students are broken down into groups such as male, female, ethnicity, economically disadvantaged and English language learners to compare their performances to each other. Brett feels that the school is making sure that all students are performing at a similar rate.
“The report just came out, so we’re still working through all the data,” Brett said. “When you have a school that is rated an A, it causes more students to want to attend that school. I think that a good school performance creates a domino effect of the school performing well, which causes the community to develop around the school which is why I always believe that a school is the center of a community.”
