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CALCULATING ACCOUNTABILITY Texas provides annual academic accountability ratings to school districts and charter schools for three areas across several factors, including State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness scores, according to the Texas Education Agency. This year, districts’ A-F rating will not be released until September, which some educators worry does not give the district enough time to react.
textual evidence skills to the social studies passage,’” Berger said. Online transition As part of the redesign, STAAR was required to be administered online by the 2022-23 school year with the reasoning being that it provides test results faster, improves test oper- ations and allows new non-multi- ple-choice questions. PISD initiated online testing in 2019—two years prior to the man- date—and allowed students to prac- tice online with the test so they could get familiar with how the new questions were asked so as to not “let the new structure inter- fere with you showing what you know,” Berger said. Alvin ISD transitioned to online testing for the 2022 spring adminis- tration of STAAR, before the man- date took e ect. “We are teaching the Texas Essen- tial Knowledge and Skills through an aligned district curriculum and ensuring students have opportuni- ties to practice the multiple answer types that are re ected on the new STAAR test,” Valdez said. “Our dis- trict testing throughout the school year is fully online to align with how students will be tested on STAAR.” However, Berger said the technol- ogy updates required for online testing have contributed to a budget gap for the district. Over the next ve years, there is an expected $25 million to $35 million needed for technology, and o cials said they do not have the projected revenue to cover this budget without dipping into reserve funds. While there is no speci c state funding set aside for this purpose, Berger said the district applies for every stream of funding that it can but felt the state has done “very lit- tle with their $32 billion surplus to support education funding.” While TEA o cials argued the transition to online testing eats up the cost of paper and other testing materials, Berger countered that the district is spending $6.8 million in the scal year 2023-24 budget to keep the 1:1 ratio of devices per student. “That is not necessarily a line- funded item allocated by the state,” Berger said. “That’s just included in our basic allotment that hasn’t changed since 2019.” In its Transition to STAAR Online Assessments Implementation Guide,
2021-22 accountability rating scores breakdown*:
Pearland ISD
Friendswood ISD
Alvin ISD
Scores are calculated for three areas
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*THESE NUMBERS REPRESENT SCALED SCORES.
Student achievement Re ects students’ scores on STAAR; graduation rates; and college, career and military readiness
School progress Re ects students’ performance over time and how a school’s performance compares to other schools with similar economically disadvantaged student populations
Closing the gaps Re ects how well a school or district is ensuring all student groups are successful
93
95
88
92
92
89
96 100 87
Take the higher score
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Student achievement score: 93 x 70% + Closing the gaps score: 96 x 30% = 93.9
Student achievement score: 95 x 70% + Closing the gaps score: 100 x 30% = 96.5
School progress score: 89 x 70% + Closing the gaps score: 87 x 30% = 88.4
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
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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.
93.9 rounds to an overall score of 94 .
96.5 rounds to an overall score of 97 .
88.4 rounds to an overall score of 88 .
NOTE: SCHOOL DISTRICTS RECEIVING A SCORE LOWER THAN A 70 ARE GIVEN A NOT RATED LABEL.
A A B
SOURCE: TEXAS EDUCATION AGENCY COMMUNITY IMPACT
districts. They also said they believe too much weight is placed on STAAR when measuring student and school performance. “We believe that students are involved in many things that help them to achieve academically,” said Jennifer Valdez, Alvin ISD dep- uty superintendent of academics. “Weighing one test on one day in the school year so heavily is not an overall accurate re ection of a student’s ability to be a successful learner. It is one measure, but not the only measure.” Local district response TEA o cials have said STAAR was redesigned to “make the test more tightly aligned to the classroom experience.” However, some local educators said they believe class- room procedures need to be adjusted to prepare students for the new test. “We’re teaching the same con- tent, it’s just being asked in a dif- ferent direction,” Pearland ISD
Superintendent Larry Berger said. In addition to now being online, the new STAAR can have up to 75% of its questions be multiple choice with the remainder consisting of 14 ques- tion types. The new question types have students perform tasks, such as selecting a point on a map or adding the missing portion of an equation, according to the TEA’s website. Since last summer, PISD’s admin- istrators have been working with teachers to get them acclimated to the questioning format for their content areas so they can e - ciently prepare their students for the new test, which was rst admin- istered in April and May 2023, said Melissa Ward, PISD’s director of testing and program evaluation. “Maybe in a classroom discus- sion, they may go deeper into some- thing rather than just a kid giving an answer,” Ward said. “Now they have to say why they came up with that answer. So they’re kind of disguis- ing that practice just through regular
classroom instruction.” The focus of these exercise and training shifts rests on the fact that students are already taught what’s on the new exam, but with the rede- sign, they had to become familiar with the new format to e ectively show what they knew, Ward said. “We don’t want to make it a STAAR lesson,” Berger said. “We just want to make it a lesson with depth and com- plexity that aligns with the possible strategy that STAAR will use to ask the questions.” Another important change is the consolidation of cross-curriculum materials on the same portions of the test. For example, students are now evaluated on their mastery of gram- mar and writing on the social studies portion of the test. “We’re making sure that our teach- ers are planning cross-curriculum and that students understand that, ‘Hey, even though [this] may be a social studies passage, I may have to apply my writing skills and my
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