Dallas ISD Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde has advised principals and teachers not to place too much importance on standardized testing preparation during the 2023-2024 school year.
Elizalde has previously criticized the amount of time and resources spent by the district preparing students to take the STAAR exam — one of the state’s most important accountability metrics for evaluating campus and district performance, as reported by The Dallas Express.
“We still have persistent gaps in student achievement, so we know we need to do something differently. And we need to listen to our teams who are truly the ones that are implementing decisions that we make,” Elizalde told NBC 5 DFW.
Addressing more than 500 of the district’s principals and teachers at a summit at Thomas Jefferson High School on Tuesday, the superintendent instructed them to focus on curriculum instead of teaching to the test, according to NBC 5.
Dallas ISD has struggled to provide a quality education for many of its roughly 140,000 students since even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, it must grapple with the learning loss incurred amid the consequent disruptions to classroom time.
“The students that were in elementary when the pandemic hit, we’re going to be seeing this for the next ten years just to erase that, there was already a gap and the gap got larger,” said School for the Talented and Gifted Principal Arnoldo Zuñiga, according to NBC 5.
Only 41% of Dallas ISD students managed to score at grade level on their STAAR exams during the 2021-2022 school year, according to that year’s Texas Education Agency (TEA) accountability report.
While not all STAAR scores for the 2022-2023 school year have been released, the TEA did publish the results of the Algebra I, Biology, English I, English II, and U.S. History exams.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, the share of students that scored at grade level in Algebra I, Biology, and U.S. History dropped by a percentage point compared to the previous year, and all three scores fell significantly under the statewide averages logged for the percentage of students scoring at grade level.
Respondents to a poll conducted last year suggested that mismanagement was one of the main reasons Dallas ISD is among the worst-performing school districts in the state.
Standing outside the auditorium, Dallas ISD Chief Academic Officer Shannon Trejo spoke with WFAA about the message being given to the attendees of the summit.
“Let’s focus on instruction, high-quality instruction in the classroom that focuses on reading, writing, and mathematics is going to be the absolute motivation for teachers and students this upcoming year. We look forward to teachers honing their craft and getting students engaged in their learning so we can have high-quality outcomes,” said Trejo.
The first day back at school for Dallas ISD students is August 14.
