Texas education authorities have added another resource to help ease public school districts’ transition to the new accountability system.
Last week, the Texas Education Agency revealed new Enhanced Performance Level Indicator Tables for assessing students’ raw scores on the STAAR, STAAR EOC, and STAAR Alternate 2. The tables reveal new scales for scores that will be used to determine student performance and, thus, school progress within the updated A-F accountability system.
For instance, a third-grade student would have had to have a raw score of at least 22 — a scaled score of 1471 — to meet grade level on the Spring 2024 math, English, and Spanish STAAR assessments. This cutoff point differs from Spring 2022, when a raw score of at least 23 — a scaled score of 1486 — would have been sufficient to meet grade level.
As reported in The Dallas Express, the past year has seen considerable changes in terms of how students and school districts are assessed.
First, the STAAR exams were redesigned to mimic classroom conditions and assess learning more closely, which has resulted in the shift to considerably more open-ended questions.
TEA also announced a new “hybrid scoring” method for evaluating STAAR exams. The exams would be graded by computers, but roughly a quarter of all written answers would be reassessed by human graders to ensure quality. Based on the currently available STAAR results for Spring 2024, Dallas ISD students’ math and science scores seem to show considerable shortcomings. For instance, only 18% of students met grade level in grade 5 science, and only 32% did so in grade 6 math.
TEA also tweaked the accountability rating system for public school districts last year. This entailed, for instance, averaging the scores of individual campuses rather than assigning a single score for the entire district based on the total number of students, as well as new cut scores that some districts, such as Dallas ISD, argue would drop their ratings in certain categories.
The ensuing legal battle effectively prevented the release of the 2022-2023 ratings, leaving district officials, parents, and other stakeholders in the dark about whether schools are meeting the state’s expectations and how to adjust to ensure that they do.
The Dallas Express‘ “Bad Apple” quarterly feature had set out to spotlight the Dallas ISD trustee whose education district contains the most students attending schools that received a letter grade of D or below. However, due to these metrics not being made available, that district cannot be determined.
Dallas ISD has not performed well on the tests in the past. The district underperformed across several metrics in the latest available TEA accountability report for the 2021-2022 school year. Only 41% of students scored at grade level on their STAAR exams, and almost 20% of Dallas ISD’s graduating Class of 2022 did not earn a diploma in four years.
Furthermore, TEA rated 57 Dallas ISD campuses a D and 29 more an F. Nevertheless, its overall rating was a B under the former accountability system.