David Feldman, a Houston attorney who represents several school districts opposed to a new state mandate to ditch the "minimum grade" practice, told me that he filed a lawsuit in Travis County district court on Wednesday.

The suit names Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott as the defendant regarding his interpretation of Senate Bill 2033, which requires school districts to record a student’s true grade and stop forcing teachers to assign a false minimum grade.

The Fort Bend school district filed the suit with the Alief, Klein, Aldine, Clear Creek and Anahuac districts.

Click here to read about the grading issue, which I wrote about earlier.

Classroom teachers have expressed concerns about being required by school districts to give a student an arbitrary minimum grade – 50 in the Fort Bend school district - when the student’s actual grade falls below that number.

Scott, in his letter to superintendents across the state, stressed the need for truth in grades reflected on report cards at each grading period.

The lawsuit, however, claims Scott overstepped his authority as an education commissioner and asks the court to allow the districts to interpret the new law individually.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the 27-page document that argues the school districts’ point that minimum grading policies "rest upon a sound pedagogical foundation":

"They ensure that a student may still gain credit for a course as a whole and, in turn, continue progressing towards graduation, even after receiving a failing grade in, say, the first grading period, provided they can attain requisite grades in subsequent grading periods for the course. As such, minimum grading policies for report cards area key tool for keeping students in school.

"Indeed, under most grading policies, for a student to receive credit for a course, the student must attain an overall passing grade (i.e., at least a 70) that is based upon the average of the grades received for each grading period. If school districts award failing grades below a minimum threshold, borderline students who perform poorly in any grading period might be unable to raise their overall course average to passing, even if they receive passing grades in all other grading periods for the course."

However, the Texas Classroom Teachers Association, which represents 50,000 public school members across the state, thinks otherwise.

"It defies logic that a series of grades not subject to an arbitrary minimum could somehow magically average to a higher minimum grade as a composite," it states in a letter to Scott while urging him to issue an interpretation of the new law.

SB 2033 is the brainchild of Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, who said she was "disturbed" by the school districts’ defiance of the law.