Local school districts have had to adjust their plans for the upcoming school year after the Texas Education Agency announced that the final reporting of all state tests taken this spring was delayed.
Districts like Frisco Independent School District (FISD) use the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) test scores to determine which students might be struggling academically.
House Bill 4545, passed in 2021, made it so that students who fail the STAAR test do not necessarily have to repeat the grade level. Instead, the district must offer tutoring to support these students.
But the final results for grades 3 to 8 won’t be available until the third week of August, meaning that FISD won’t know which students will need tutoring until after the school year has already begun.
FISD kicks off the 2023-24 school year on August 9, with only a handful of North Texas districts — such as Alvarado ISD, Argyle ISD, Mabank ISD, and Melissa ISD — starting after the scheduled receipt of the STAAR exam scores.
According to Christy Fiori, executive director of teaching and learning at FISD, the delay means the staff will have to prepare an accelerated tutoring schedule, but there is no reason to fret.
“Getting [STAAR scores] later doesn’t change what we do,” Fiori told Community Impact. “It just expedites the time. We don’t want kids to wait if they’re needing interventions and support based off of these results.”
Pam Orr, FISD’s managing director of elementary teaching and learning, noted the district also uses STAAR scores to identify trends and assess its curriculum.
“If we see that there are certain content areas or certain standards that everybody struggled on … that’s a good reflection for us to see if we need to make any curricular adjustments,” Orr said, according to Community Impact.
On last year’s STAAR exams, roughly 74% of FISD students scored at grade level, according to Texas Education Agency (TEA) accountability reports. This was vastly better than underperforming Dallas ISD, where only 41% of students scored at grade level.
Yet this year, TEA debuted an updated design for the STAAR test, as previously covered in The Dallas Express.
Alongside being administered entirely online, the new design aims to better mirror the conditions experienced by students in the classroom.
For instance, there is now a 75% cap on multiple-choice questions in favor of open-ended questions, which are more frequently used by educators as they teach.
Students are also asked to write text-based responses using cross-curricular passages that assess not just their reading and writing skills but also their breadth of knowledge in all subjects.
“[The changes] are all good things that we’re excited about,” Fiori suggested, according to Community Impact. “However, it is a change for our students, and it is different.”
Because of the STAAR redesign, TEA reportedly needed more time to verify the scores this year.
STAAR scores for students in grades 3 to 8 across Texas should be available by August 16.