STAAR report shows Fort Worth students struggled with math, reading during pandemic
More than twice as many eighth graders in Fort Worth schools are not meeting grade level in math as in 2019, a stark drop highlighted in state assessment data released Monday.
In Fort Worth and across Texas, students lost substantial ground both in reading and in math, according to the results of this year’s State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR. Those results highlight the academic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic that state policymakers, education officials and researchers have warned of for more than a year.
In the Fort Worth school district, fewer students in all grade levels 3-8 met or approached grade level in reading or math in the spring of 2021 compared to the spring of 2019, according to the report.
Statewide, the number of students who didn’t meet grade level increased across all grade levels and subjects except English I and II, the agency reported. Results were worse in math than in reading — the number of students who didn’t meet grade level in math grew by 16 percentage points over 2019, while the number of students who didn’t perform on grade level in reading grew by just four points.
That trend — more severe effects in math than in reading — tracks with forecasts researchers have made since the beginning of the pandemic. Education researchers think that trend is due to the fact that most parents are better equipped to support their children in learning reading than math.
State data also showed the impact of online learning on students’ academic performance.
In math, districts with fewer than 25% of their students in person showed a 32 percentage point increase in the number of students who didn’t meet grade level, as compared to just nine percentage points in districts where more than 75% of students attended school in person. In reading, districts with few in-person students posted a nine percentage point increase in students who didn’t meet grade level. In districts where more than 75% of students attended in person, the number of students who didn’t perform on grade level in reading grew by just one percentage point.
In a statement, Fort Worth Superintendent Kent Scribner said Monday’s data “was not unexpected.” Scribner highlighted the district’s expanded summer school program, which began last week, as one of the ways the district is looking to help students regain ground they lost during the pandemic. The district’s plan for learning recovery also includes high-impact tutoring, expanded broadband access in underserved areas and stronger social and emotional supports for students.
“We recognize that the past 16 months have been extraordinarily difficult for our families, our students, our teachers and staff,” Scribner said. “We now have an opportunity to respond to these data with initiatives and solutions to accelerate student learning to regain and surpass pre-pandemic levels of learning. With the support of Board Trustees, we are committed to doing that work.”
Jerry Moore, the district’s chief academic officer, said district officials expected the sharp uptick in the number of students scoring below grade level. More than 80% of the district’s students are economically disadvantaged, and Moore said district leaders knew students would struggle in remote learning.
District leaders knew they needed to intervene after they saw the results of beginning- and mid-year assessments, Moore said. So they had “purposeful conversations” with principals and teachers about keeping their focus on providing high-quality instruction, he said. By the spring, district leaders began to see growth, he said.
The Fort Worth school district’s numbers placed it roughly in the middle of the pack among the 11 districts the Texas Education Agency classifies as major urban districts. In third grade math, Fort Worth saw a 23 percentage point uptick in the number of test-takers who didn’t meet grade level. San Antonio’s North East school district saw the smallest uptick among urban districts, with a 10 percentage point increase in that category. El Paso’s Socorro school district saw the largest, with a 40% increase.
In third grade reading, the Fort Worth school district posted an 11-point uptick in students who tested below grade level. The Socorro school district saw a 20-point uptick, while the North East school district saw just a four-point increase.
STAAR system problems, opt-outs create uncertainty
This year’s STAAR testing process was filled with caveats. A system crash during testing in April forced many districts across the state, including the Fort Worth school district, to pause or postpone testing. The state also gave parents of remote students the ability to opt out of sending their children to school in person for testing, while still requiring in-person students to take the test.
Chris Domaleski, associate director of the Center for Assessment, said most states are dealing with the issue of uneven participation in this year’s state tests. By itself, that problem doesn’t create much of a reliability problem for state test results, he said, although it does add a certain amount of uncertainty to those results. In most cases, states should simply release those results with additional context explaining the challenges of conducting tests during a pandemic, he said.
The technical problems that plagued Texas’ testing platform could create a bigger issue, Domaleski said. Even though the testing system eventually came back online, those problems likely left some students feeling frustrated and demotivated, he said. The state would do well to exercise added scrutiny around this year’s results to figure out how those system problems affected the results, he said.
In a media call Monday morning, Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath said that despite the lower participation rate than in recent years and technical issues, the data was reliable.
“What we have largely seen is that nearly everyone did in fact take the assessment, whether the students were virtual or in person,” he said. “Our normal rate of participation for spring assessments is about 96%, and this year we had 87%.”
Morath added that there is a “very slight over-representation in the non-tested student group of economically disadvantaged students which could lead one to a conclusion that the overall scores that you’ll see might not be a full representation of underlying student performance.”
“But we think, again, at the scale of the size of Texas, these numbers are all very accurate in terms of the conclusions one to withdraw,” Morath said.
With the STAAR data as a baseline, Morath pointed to legislation that will shape how school districts will move forward in recovering from the stark learning loss seen over the last year-and-a-half.
House Bill 4545, for example, eliminates the requirement for students in grades 3-8 to retake the STAAR exam if they fail, and instead funnels those students into intensive tutoring “and/or the highest performing teacher available in the next grade.”
“It creates a series of new rights for parents, especially if their students are notably below grade level,” Morath said, adding that the legislation is “doubling down on this idea that STAAR is not punitive.”
“In years past students might have to retake the STAAR test if they didn’t perform well,” he said. “STAAR is about identifying student need and creating targeted supports from us as adults. So students who do not meet grade level are now entitled to receive extra services from their districts.”
Those supports could include up to three sessions of tutoring embedded in the school day or after school, support on district-provided devices, or other independent tutoring, Morath said.
Jennifer Bailey, a professor of educational leadership in the University of Texas at Arlington’s College of Education, said the numbers are “shocking” at first glance. But they offer teachers and districts valuable insight into the gaps in students’ learning, which allows them to plan more effectively for the upcoming school year. In that sense, she said, those results leave Texas schools in a better position than they found themselves at the beginning of the 2019-20 school year, when they had no way of knowing how students were doing academically.
Bailey, who served as an elementary principal in two districts in East Texas before coming to UTA, compared it to a patient who finds out he or she has high blood pressure during an annual checkup. The news itself isn’t good, but the diagnosis can help the patient and the doctor come up with a plan for dealing with it, she said.
This story was originally published June 28, 2021 at 11:10 AM.
