Last week, the Texas Education Agency sent out a memo that basically admitted that the original plans to implement STAAR did not work out remotely as intended.
As you may recall, the test designers and state originally came up with cut scores — passing marks — that represented what they considered the road to college readiness. Recognizing the need for an adjustment period, the state created a two-step phase-in plan. The cut scores would be pretty low for two years, halfway harder for two years, and “college ready” on the fifth year.
The sand in the gears is the fact that the first three years of STAAR scores were about as flat as a pool table. Every test, every grade. The assumption that there would be a steady and significant increase in student scores turned out to be false, and not just by a little.
The new plan? This school year will be the fourth using the phase 1 cut scores. Next year will see a phase 2 that is more like phase 1.5 — a lesser first jump than was originally planned. The next rise in cut scores would not happen until 2018-2019. And two years after that, we get to the final standards. Ten years of STAAR before those final cut scores kick in.
(Exactly how much those next cut scores will jump is a detail the TEA is still working out. The original plan used a pretty simply statistical formula. But GIGO.)
I will note a few things:
None of Texas’ standardized tests have ever gone a full decade without a significant reboot. (TAAS lasted a decade under the same name but got seriously adjusted a couple of years into its span.) So the chance of the Texas Legislature letting STAAR go unchanged to the end of this new timeline seems small, based on history.
And nothing in the note indicates there’s any serious reconsideration of the underlying assumptions behind the cut scores. Which made me curious about how far Texas kids are from that putative “college readiness” standard. I already knew that more than half of Texas students would have failed every single test if last year’s students had faced the final standards. And I already knew that poor, black and Hispanic students were more likely to have failed. But what about kids not in those lower-performing categories?
So I pulled up the STAAR data for most tests in grades 3-8 for Highland Park ISD (the North Texas one). This is a district that, according to its website, sends more than 98% of students to colleges and universities. Only one economically disadvantaged kid, a seventh grader, took any of those tests.
About a quarter of third, fourth, and seventh graders would have failed their math tests, if the cut scores had met the final “college readiness” standard. About 40 percent of eighth graders would have failed science and social studies. Overall, between a fifth and a quarter of Highland Park kids would have failed most of the tests.
On the one hand, clearly those “final” passing rates are not unattainable: Many students are hitting that mark now. But many students, including some for whom actual college readiness is apparently not a question for actual colleges, are not.
I’ve got some other questions about what this new plan means. When I get some answers, I’ll post ‘em.