About a dozen districts will see a bump in school accountability ratings on Tuesday after a manual rescoring of thousands of STAAR tests improved some results.
Texas Education Agency officials said Friday about 27,200 students received additional credit for their text responses to some questions on the reading portion of the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness. The adjustments impacted some sixth through eighth graders, as well as those who took the English I end-of-course exam.
The affected districts consist of Chester, Crandall, Daingerfield-Lone Star, Floydada Collegiate, Forney, Fredericksburg, Galveston, Jim Hogg County, Odem-Edroy, Southwest and Walnut Bend ISDs, agency spokesperson Jake Kobersky said.
Nine campuses and five districts saw their A-F rating increases as a result, officials said.
In December 2023, the TEA began using a computer-automated process to grade open-ended questions on the STAAR, including on the reading and English exams, with humans manually reviewing at least a quarter of exam scores. However, Kobersky said none of the regraded responses were graded by its “automated scoring engine.”
The changed scores came as part of an annual review of test scores. Content experts rescored “text entry” responses, where students type brief text — such as a number, word, or phrase. The automated model reviews short and extended constructed-response questions, which ask students to provide longer answers.
About 1.7% of more than 1.6 million exams reviewed saw scores improve, although not all increases directly led to improved A-F ratings for schools, agency officials said.
In Galveston ISD, Central Middle School — which initially earned a D this year — will see its rating increase by six points to a 75 after the rescoring, according to records from the TEA that the district provided to The Texas Tribune. A spokesperson for the 6,671-student district declined a request to comment on the increase.
Southwest ISD spokesperson Jennifer Collier that the district’s overall accountability rating will increase from a 79 to an 80 after the rescoring of state exams at its middle schools, bumping it up to a B. Brandon Crisp, acting superintendent of the 14,868-student district, said in a statement that the ratings “now reflect” the progress that students and staff have made.
The state’s academic ratings are largely based on how well students do on STAAR tests.
The agency routinely reviews STAAR results each year to confirm the accuracy and fairness of the scores, officials said. The process includes automated rescoring checks, consideration of feedback from educators and a review of open-ended responses.
“As part of this process, student responses are reviewed by content experts to review responses that may not fit neatly into the original rules to ensure students receive the credit they deserve,” Kobersky said. “For example: If the correct answer to a question was ‘first,’ content experts may decide to award credit for a student that entered the response ‘ferst.’”
No students’ scores will be lowered as a result of the review.
Texas has about 1,200 school districts and charter systems and more than 9,100 public school campuses.
Texas released the preliminary accountability ratings on Aug. 14. Districts with a campus that has five years of consecutive failing grades can trigger sanctions, including a potential state takeover.
Ratings for schools and districts largely depend on three metrics: how students perform on the STAAR and meet college and career readiness benchmarks; how results on state tests improve over time; and how well schools educate underserved children.
TEA officials will automatically update ratings for the impacted schools and districts without requiring an appeal. Districts can file an appeal of their preliminary ratings until Sept. 11.
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