FWISD will part ways with a charter group operating this struggling Stop Six school

The Fort Worth Independent School District is parting ways with an Indianapolis-based charter school operator it brought in two years ago to run a struggling middle school in Stop Six.

The district turned the day-to-day operations at Jacquet Middle School over to Phalen Leadership Academy in 2021. The district’s agreement with the charter school operator included the expectation that student performance would improve at the school, which was an F-rated campus at the time. A year into that partnership, Jacquet remained an F-rated school.

On Monday, Fort Worth ISD officials announced that the district would end the partnership on June 30. Chana Barrett, Jacquet’s principal, will remain in place for the 2023-24 school year.

Jacquet Middle School turnaround never took shape

The district’s agreement with Phalen included a requirement that Jacquet would be a C-rated campus at the end of the first year of the partnership. By the next year, Jacquet should have been a B-rated school, under the arrangement.

But Jacquet never came close to that C rating. In the Texas Education Agency’s 2022 A-F accountability scores, the school received an overall rating of 59. Typical year, that score would translate to an F rating. But due to a change in state law, the state education agency didn’t issue letter grades last year for any campus or district that scored below a 70.

Student performance at the school remained poor a year into the partnership. Just 16% of sixth graders met grade-level standards in reading last year, up from 8% in 2021. In math, just 4% scored on grade level, up from 2% the previous year.

Seventh and eighth grade reading scores were marginally better. A quarter of seventh-graders scored on grade level in reading, up from 18% in 2021. In eighth grade, 20% scored on grade level in reading, down from 21% the previous year.

But seventh and eighth grade math scores declined a year into the partnership with Phalen. Last year, virtually no seventh grader scored on grade level in math, down from just 1% the year before. In eighth grade, 4% scored on grade level last year, down from 9% in 2021.

The school was also one of the most violent in the district. According to district records obtained through an open records request, there were 254 fights and student-on-student assaults at Jacquet during the 2021-22 school year, which was Phalen’s first year operating the campus. That was more than during any year in at least the past five years. Only three campuses in the district — Forest Oak, Rosemont and Meadowbrook middle schools — had more fights and assaults than Jacquet that year, district figures show.

In response to the continued low performance at Jacquet, Fort Worth ISD officials said they would take greater ownership of the campus, including making more monitoring visits to make sure Phalen was living up to its end of the agreement.

School partnerships show results elsewhere

The partnership was based on a framework state lawmakers laid out in 2017, which gives school districts financial incentives to turn over operations at struggling campuses to outside entities, including charter operators, universities or nonprofits. Fort Worth ISD has a similar partnership with Texas Wesleyan University to manage the six-campus Leadership Academy Network. Five of the six schools in the network received A or B ratings last year.

Jacquet was the third school in Texas where Phalen took over operations. In 2019, the Beaumont Independent School District brought the charter operator in to take over two F-rated schools. Because of the change in state law, neither of those schools received a letter grade last year. But Smith Middle School received a score of 59, which would be equivalent to an F in a typical year. Jones-Clark Elementary School received a score of 65, which would be a D.