San Marcos - Buda - Kyle Edition | August 2023

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CALCULATING ACCOUNTABILITY The Texas Education Agency provides annual academic accountability letter grades based on scores of up to 100 to its public school districts, individual campuses and charter schools for three areas across several factors, including STAAR scores.

online format,” SMCISD Chief Aca- demic Ocer Terrence Sanders said. Lily Laux, the Texas Education Agen- cy’s deputy commissioner of school programs, said the redesign and move online came about through work to “understand from teachers and from other folks what would a better STAAR experience look like.” Weighing the scores The new redesign highlighted unique hurdles for some districts. SMCISD’s raw scores, which were released to districts in June, indicated the writing component proved di- cult for testers. “They can read a passage; they can answer it, [but] when it gets into writing … we need to expend some resources to support our teachers and kids in that area,” SMCISD Superin- tendent Michael Cardona said. Apart from the issues, Cardona cited gains at the elementary level along with English II, social studies and science scores, which were all roughly within the state’s expected performance standards. The SMCISD school board’s goal is for every cam- pus’s accountability rating to increase by one letter grade. From an admin- istrative standpoint, Cardona said he would like for every campus to be rated a B or higher. “[The TEA has] tried to simplify things in some areas, putting the writing I think probably was a good thought but I think it created some issues,” Cardona said. Derek McDaniel, HCISD’s executive ocer of curriculum and instruction, said the raw scores show the district’s writing tallied a half point to a full point higher than the state’s average. Each district was challenged by the method used to assess the

2021-22 accountability rating scores:

HAYS CISD SAN MARCOS CISD

Scores are tallied for three areas 1

Reects students’ scores on STAAR; graduation rates; and college, career and military readiness Student Achievement

Reects students’ performance over time and how a school’s performance compares to other schools with similar economically disadvantaged student populations School Progress

Reects how well a school or district is ensuring all student groups are successful Closing the Gaps

Take the higher score 2

School Progress score: 89 x 70% + Closing the Gaps score: 82 x 30% = 86.9

School Progress score: 81 x 70% + Closing the Gaps score: 72 x 30% = 78.3

The higher score of either Student Achievement or School Progress accounts for 70% of the total score, while Closing the Gaps accounts for 30%.

30% Closing the Gaps

70% Student Achievement or School Progress

Round the total 3

A = 90-100 B = 80-89 C = 70-79 Not rated = 0-69

Round the total score to a whole number to determine the overall ranking.

86.9 rounds to an overall score of 87 .

78.3 rounds to an overall score of 78 .

NOTE: SCHOOL DISTRICTS WITH A SCORE LOWER THAN 70 ARE GIVEN A NOT RATED LABEL.

SOURCE: TEXAS EDUCATION AGENCYCOMMUNITY IMPACT

January 2022. The district worked to put together trainings and assess- ments to inform teachers on what the new question types were going to look like and worked to build assessments that “mirror” the STAAR. “Teachers started embedding those into their lessons in little bite-sized chunks,” McDaniel said. “It was really about exposure. We just didn’t want

writing portion, which became a “lit- tle bit of an issue” with the third- and fourth-graders for HCISD, McDaniel said. But teachers did a bit of typing practice to get students more com- fortable typing on keyboards during benchmark testing. Cardona said the assessment can be debated with pros and cons. “It’s what’s in front of us, and at

the end of the day, I think what we’re trying to do is understand each of the stories that every kid brings into the building and then put a system in place that allows for them to grow and

develop,” Cardona said. Reviewing the redesign

For HCISD, teachers began train- ing to teach the new format in

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