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AUSTIN (AP) – A legal effort to block Texas from releasing school performance ratings has created a divide between district leaders who worry the scores are an inaccurate representation of their work and others who say parents need that information to make choices about their kids’ schooling.

A coalition of about 30 school districts recently sued the Texas Education Agency over the introduction of a computer system to grade the state’s standardized tests, which are used to calculate part of Texas schools’ performance rating. The year before, school districts filed a similar lawsuit arguing that the agency had raised too fast a benchmark that also goes into their score. Judges out of Travis County have sided with the school districts in both cases, ordering temporary injunctions that have kept the TEA from releasing the ratings for two consecutive school years.

The latest lawsuit has been met with wariness from some school leaders, a marked shift from when more than a 100 districts saddled up for the first suit to create a unified front against the TEA.

While the state’s hands have been tied from releasing ratings this year, some school districts in Bexar, Dallas, El Paso and Harris counties have voluntarily released their own campuses’ forecast scores. One board trustee out of Midland’s school district unsuccessfully filed a petition with the court to intervene in the lawsuit, saying time and money were wasted on standardized testing if the public could not access school performance ratings.

“If I’m going to put billboards up and I’m going to put up a fancy website promoting our academic programs or early college high school programs, I believe I owe it to that same community, those same parents, (to) put out scores,” said Xavier de la Torre, the superintendent of the Ysleta school district in El Paso.

The TEA grades every public and charter school in the state on an A-F scale. A failing grade can trigger state sanctions and it can lead the TEA to take over a district in the worst cases. Poor scores can also push families to leave the district and, since schools get money from the state based on enrollment, could lead to less funds.

Some school leaders criticized the automated computer system used to grade the statewide standardized test this year, saying a third party should have reviewed the tool before it was rolled out. They believe statewide drops in reading scores were due to errors with the system and would result in an unfair school rating.

School leaders also said they didn’t get enough notice when TEA introduced stricter expectations for how schools show they’re preparing students for life after graduation. High schools can now only get an “A” rating if 88% of their seniors enrolled in college, pursued a non-college career or entered the military, up from 60%.

Bobby Ott, the superintendent of Temple’s school district, said he never saw the changes to the career readiness benchmarks coming.

“It wasn’t even a target we could prepare for, and that was just completely uncalled for,” he said. “In no real-time situation do you measure progress improvement by doing a ‘ready, fire, aim’ approach. There’s no system built like that … There’s no chance to build to that goal.”

But critics question if back-to-back lawsuits are the best means to raise concerns about the changes. Families have now gone five years without a full picture of how their schools are doing. Texas did not release school ratings in 2020 or 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic; in 2022, Texas lawmakers ordered the state to only release A-C ratings.

Ott agreed a legal fight wasn’t the ideal way to settle disputes with the changes but he said lawmakers left districts no choice because they haven’t addressed their concerns.

The Dallas Independent School District was among the districts that joined in on the first lawsuit. A year later, it was one of the first to voluntarily release their own ratings.

“We’re all being held to that same calculation. So the fact that (the state’s rating system) is imperfect does not mean that we shouldn’t measure it at all,” said Dallas ISD Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde. “I feel like I owe it to our community, and, frankly, to the state of Texas to say, ‘here is where we are.’”

Elizalde said her district joined the first lawsuit because she wanted one more year to understand the new college and career readiness benchmarks before they went into effect. Now that that year had come and passed, Elizalde said her district needed to be transparent about its rating so her team could set performance goals — even if she does share some of the same computer scoring concerns listed in the latest lawsuit.

“If I don’t talk about where we are now, how can I explain how we’re improving?” she said.

Dallas ISD expects to get a C rating this year, a drop from the B it earned in the 2021-22 school year.

Parents lean on A-F scores to understand how their local schools are performing and, if they have the resources, they can use that information to make decisions about where to send their kids to school.

In the El Paso area, school districts in that region are open enrollment, which means families can apply to enroll their child in any school within the district regardless of where they live. The Ysleta, Socorro and El Paso school districts all released their ratings so parents could make informed decisions.

Charter schools leaders say they also benefit from having that information out in the open since many parents find them after assessing local public schools and removing their kids when they are dissatisfied.

“If parents and communities don’t understand the levels of performance of the schools in their neighborhoods … across a state standardized metric, then parents are left in the dark,” said Jeff Cottrill, the superintendent of IDEA Public Schools, Texas’ largest charter school.

The fissures forming between district leaders over the A-F accountability system come as next year’s legislative session looms near. Lawmakers are expected to propose new school voucher legislation, which would let families use taxpayer dollars to pay for their children’s private schooling. Districts are also expected to ask for a raise in the base amount of dollars they get per student after five years of no increases.

Elizalde in Dallas worries that withholding information about public schools’ performance might weaken their ask.

“We know we’re going to be asking for funding for schools. Am I really in the position to say our schools need funding, but I don’t want to tell you how we’re doing? It didn’t sit right with me.”

When asked about how he expects the lawsuit to impact superintendents’ legislative requests, Ott said he hopes the lawsuit will be a catalyst for overhauling the A-F system altogether.

Families in his district have lost trust in the standardized testing system, Ott said. Instead, they want school ratings to measure if schools are safe as well as the experience and tenure of teachers, he added.

“There should be accountability and transparency,” he said. “But they have to be good, solid systems that people can trust and have credibility. And that’s the problem right now. It’s an antiquated system.”

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Donald Trump has long pledged to deport millions of people, but he’s bringing more specifics to his current bid for the White House: invoking wartime powers, relying on like-minded governors and using the military.

Trump’s record as president shows a vast gulf between his ambitions and the legal, fiscal and political realities of mass deportations of people in the United States illegally — 11 million in January 2022, by the Homeland Security Department’s latest estimate. Former President Barack Obama carried out 432,000 deportations in 2013, the highest annual total since records were kept.

Deportations under Trump never topped 350,000. But he and his chief immigration policy architect, Stephen Miller, have offered clues in interviews and rallies of taking a different approach if they are returned to power in November. They could benefit from lessons learned during their of four years in office and, potentially, from more Trump-appointed judges.

“What Trump seems to be contemplating is potentially lawful,” said Joseph Nunn, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law. “There might not be a lot of legal barriers. It is going to be logistically extraordinarily complicated and difficult. The military is not going to like doing it and they are going to drag their feet as much as they can, but it is possible, so it should be taken seriously.”

The Trump campaign, asked how his pledge would be carried out, said Trump would begin the largest deportation program in U.S. history, without elaborating in detail. Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman, said Trump “would marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers.”

How would Trump overcome inevitable legal challenges?

Trump has said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that allows the president to deport any noncitizen from a country that the U.S. is at war with.

Texas Gov, Greg Abbott has advanced a theory that illegal immigration amounts to an invasion to justify state enforcement measures, so far without success, but legal scholars say judges may be reluctant to second-guess what a president considers a foreign aggression.

The sweeping Alien Enemies Act authority may sidestep a law that bans the military from civilian law enforcement.

Trump has said he would focus on deploying the National Guard, whose troops can be activated on orders of a governor. Miller says troops under sympathetic Republican governors would send troops to nearby states that refuse to participate.

“The Alabama National Guard is going to arrest illegal aliens in Alabama and the Virginia National Guard in Virginia. And if you’re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, there would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland, right, very close, very nearby,” Miller said last year on “The Charlie Kirk Show.”

The military has been peripherally involved at the border since President George W. Bush’s administration with activities that are not deemed to be law enforcement, such as surveillance, vehicle maintenance and installing concertina wire.

Nunn, of New York University’s Brennan Center, said Trump may look to 2020, when he ordered the National Guard to disperse peaceful Black Lives Matter protests near the White House, despite the mayor’s opposition. Trump did so without invoking the 18th-century war powers law, but the District of Columbia’s federal status gives the president outsized authority to act.

Trump may also contend with rights afforded under immigration law and court rulings that took shape after 1798, including a right to seek asylum that became law in 1980. Under a 2001 Supreme Court ruling, people in the country illegally can’t be detained indefinitely if there is no reasonable chance their countries will take them back. Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and others are either slow to accept their citizens or refuse.

How would Trump pay for this?

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is funded by Congress for 41,500 detention beds this year, raising questions about where Trump would house people before they board deportation flights and how long they could hold them if countries refuse to take them back. Miller floated the idea of “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas.”

ICE officers are painstakingly deliberate, researching backgrounds of their targets and prioritizing people with criminal convictions. They try to capture suspects outside their homes because they generally work without court warrants and people don’t have to let them inside.

A single arrest may require hours of surveillance and research, a job that one ICE official likened to watching paint dry.

“On practical level, it will be nearly impossible for (Trump) to do the things he’s talking about, even if could bring in the military,” said John Sandweg, a senior Homeland Security Department official in the Obama administration.

Obama’s deportation numbers were made possible by local police who turned people over to ICE, but many state and local governments have since introduced limits on cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Obama’s presidency also predated a surge of asylum-seekers at the border, which drained limited resources of the Trump and Biden administrations.

How would a mass deportation drive fare politically?

While many support Trump’s plans, mass deportation could tear apart families, exacerbate labor shortages and uproot people with deep ties to their communities. Pew Research Center estimates 70% of households with at least one person in the United States illegally also have someone in the country legally.

Military leaders are likely to resist because it would undercut other priorities and damage morale, Nunn said.

“The military is going see this and say this is not the kind of duty that soldiers signed up for,” he said. “This is getting the military involved in domestic politics in a way the military doesn’t like to do.”

Adam Goodman, associate professor of history and Latin American studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who has written about deportations, said a threat of a mass expulsion can have a serious impact even if it isn’t carried out. He thinks it is highly unlikely that Trump can do what he promises but it can strike fear in immigrant communities.

In June 2019, Trump announced ICE would “begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens” the following week. A month later, the agency said it targeted about 2,100 people, resulting in 35 arrests, indicating the president’s plans fell far short but only after they generated widespread concern in immigrant communities.

Trump himself acknowledged the political perils during an interview Sunday with journalist Sharyl Attkisson. “You put one wrong person onto a bus or onto an airplane and your radical left lunatics will try and make it sound like it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened,” Trump said, before repeating his pledge: “But we’re getting the criminals out. And we’re going to do that fast.”

(ABC) Selma — A man initially interviewed as a witness at the scene of a murder has now been arrested over a year later in the apparent road rage slaying, authorities in Texas announced.

Jacob Daniel Serna, 29, was arrested on Thursday for the murder of Joseph Banales, according to police in Selma, located about 20 miles outside of San Antonio.

The case began on April 15, 2023, when Selma police said they responded to a single-car crash and found Banales shot in the head and slumped over his steering wheel.

Banales, a nursing student and Army ROTC member at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, was declared dead at the scene, police said.

Witnesses said Banales tried to merge into another lane and almost hit a dark blue or black sports car with a loud exhaust system, according to the probable cause affidavit. The sports car slowed down, then spend up along the driver’s side of Banales’ car, witnesses said. Then Banales’ car swerved into another lane and crashed into the center median, and the sports car fled, according to the probable cause affidavit.

Banales was on the phone with his girlfriend at the time; she told police she heard what sounded like a loud exhaust system driving by quickly, then a crash, the document said.

Serna and his wife were at the scene when officers arrived, police said. Officer dashboard camera captured Serna standing over Banales’ body, the probable cause affidavit said.

Serna — who drove a blue Ford Mustang sports car — and his wife were interviewed several times, and their stories changed over time, according to police.

Initially, Serna’s wife told police she saw a blue sports car — similar to the color of their car — in the lane next to Banales, the probable cause affidavit said. Serna told police he didn’t see anything and his wife saw the crash, according to the probable cause affidavit.

This July, police interviewed Serna’s wife again. The Sernas are now separated, according to the probable cause affidavit, and she said her husband had sped up to get a better look at the potential suspect’s car, but the suspect’s car was driving too fast, and that’s when the crash happened, the document said.

On Thursday, police interviewed Serna’s wife again. She admitted her husband shot the victim after her husband “became angry that Banales had nearly changed lanes into his blue Mustang,” police said in a statement on Friday.

She said her husband pulled his pistol out of the glove box, loaded the weapon and fired, according to the probable cause affidavit.

She said she made her husband turn around and drive back to the scene, according to the probable cause affidavit.

During the investigation, police zeroed-in on cellphone records to help determine “who could have been driving a blue sports car at the crime scene,” police said in a statement.

The probe, which included searching license plate reader databases, “revealed only one vehicle matching the description of a blue sports car with loud exhaust” — Serna’s car, police said.

“Google Geo-Fence records show Serna’s Google activity pinging in the area at the same time investigators believe the shooting happened,” police added.

Serna has been booked into the Bexar County Jail, police said.

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FORT BLISS – The U.S. Army soldier who was temporarily detained by North Korea last year after running across the Demilitarized Zone was sentenced to 12 months’ confinement after pleading guilty Friday to desertion and four other charges, including assaulting an officer.

According to Fox News, the military court judge at Fort Bliss, Texas, reportedly told King that without the plea he could serve up to 20 years following his admission of guilt.

King was declared a free man on Friday based on the 338 days he had already served awaiting trial and good behavior. He also received a dishonorable discharge from the United States Army.

“With time already served and credit for good behavior, Travis [is] now free and will return home,” his attorney, Franklin D. Rosenblatt, told Fox News.

Nine other offenses that King faced, including possession of sexual images of a child, were withdrawn and dismissed under the terms of a plea agreement he reached, according to The Associated Press.

King bolted across the heavily fortified border from South Korea in July 2023 and became the first American detained in North Korea in nearly five years.

His run into North Korea came soon after he was released from a South Korean prison where he had served nearly two months on assault charges.

About a week after his release from the prison, military officers took him to the airport so he could return to Fort Bliss to face disciplinary action. He was escorted as far as customs, but instead of getting on the plane, he joined a civilian tour of the Korean border village of Panmunjom.

He then ran across the border, which is lined with guards and often crowded with tourists.

King ultimately was detained by North Korea, but after about two months, Pyongyang abruptly announced that it would expel him. On Sept. 28, he was flown back to Texas, and has been in custody there.

King spent a total of 71 days in North Korean custody.