STAAR struggles: Fort Worth middle school students miss the mark

Middle school students struggled with STAAR tests in reading, writing, math and social studies while elementary students showed improvement in most assessments, according to a preliminary 2016 analysis by the Fort Worth school district.

Fort Worth school district officials say most their of academic pitfalls can be traced to reading and comprehension.

“One of the things we have to get better about as a district is working with students who are struggling with reading regardless of the subject area,” said Charles Carroll, chief academic officer for Fort Worth schools.

Among the most significant results:

Eighth-grade social studies: 52 percent of 5,359 students met the standard, compared with 64 percent statewide.

Eighth-grade reading: 75 percent of 4,837 students met standard, compared with 82 percent statewide.

Seventh-grade math: 40 percent of 3,856 students met the standard, compared with 71 percent statewide.

Seventh-grade writing: 57 percent of 5,587 students met the standard, compared with 72 percent statewide.

Sixth-grade math: 57 percent of 5,136 students met the standard, compared with 74 percent statewide.

Elementary school students (grades 3-5): 85 percent met the standard in 11 of 13 tested areas. Only the third and fourth-grade students who took the reading test in Spanish didn’t meet the 60 percent benchmark for passing.

“When we have any student who is not successful, we still have work to do,” said Sara Arispe, assistant superintendent of accountability for the Fort Worth school district.

These preliminary results are just one factor used by the state when it releases district and campus accountability ratings in early August. Schools get one of two ratings: Met Standard or Improvement Required.

“Accountability is much bigger than that — it looks at a number of different things,” Arispe said, explaining that the state also looks student growth/progress, achievement gaps and career/college readiness when it determines a rating.

STAAR results coming in the mail

Fort Worth students in grades three through eight will receive the results of their State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR tests, by mail. The district began printing and mailing the results this week

In past years, students were usually able to take their test results home. For example, high school students who took the end-of-course exams received their results around graduation time.

However, because of issues with the testing contractor this year, Texas school districts received the STAAR results later than usual.

The district is mailing individual results to students in a massive mail-out — something it hasn’t done before, said Barbara Griffith, district spokeswoman.

Because school is out, finding out more about test results could be prove more difficult for parents this year, Arispe said. If parents have concerns, they are urged to meet with their principal before school starts, on Aug. 22.

“You have a couple of weeks where no one is at the campus,” Arispe said.

Passing standards increased

Statewide, elementary and middle school students showed improvement in 13 of 17 STAAR exams, when compared with the 2015 standard, according to figures released Thursday by the Texas Education Agency. But when using the new standard for 2016, with students having to answer more questions correctly to pass, the students performed better on only six assessments and worse or the same on 11 of the exams.

Each subject has a certain number of questions student need to answer correctly to pass, Arispe said. There are not the same number of questions on every test. For example, the number of questions on a math test could be different from the number of questions on a reading test. The number of questions on a test also changes from grade to grade, Arispe said.

This year, for example, seventh-grade students had to answer 22 of 54 questions correctly to meet the passing standard on the math assessment.

The continuing changes make comparing results from year to year more complicated, say educators.

Arispe said that even if scores are placed side-by-side to look for mathematical differences in the percent passing, the change in standard creates an apples vs. oranges comparison.

Further complicating the results were scoring issues with the fifth- and eighth-grade reading and math exams.

Under state law, Texas fifth- and eighth-graders must pass the STAAR reading and math tests to be promoted to the next grade. Typically, students who failed those can retake the test three times and those results are added to the data districts get.

That didn’t happen this year because of scoring errors and a variety of other problems by the state contractor who does testing. So instead of having to pass retests, the fifth- and eighth-graders who failed math or reading tests received waivers.

In June, Commissioner of Education Mike Morath announced that grade promotion consequences attached to the test were removed for the 2015-2016 school year.

An academic gap exposed

In Fort Worth, Carroll said students need to better comprehend and analyze what they are reading. They also need to know more academic vocabulary, he said.

Carroll said that means more reading and writing across core subject areas. It also means emphasizing more nonfiction text, which is heavily emphasized in the STAAR tests.

The academic reading gap exists across subject areas tested, including math, which includes word problems that may include words such as “mean” and “mode,” Carroll said.

“It’s as simple as knowing that there is a difference between a circle and a sphere,” Carroll said. “Science has that very specialized nomenclature. People don’t even think of social studies having the same thing.”

Under new Superintendent Kent Scribner, the Fort Worth school district has made reading a top priority, and a new citywide initiative is expected be announced in the coming weeks.

Scribner has said that only 30 percent of Fort Worth’s third-graders are reading at grade level, and his goal is to increase that number to 100 percent by 2025.

Understand the vocabulary

Carroll used an eighth-grade social studies question to better explain the importance of reading — and understanding what has been read.

When Texas students learn about the Constitutional Convention of 1787, they discuss how delegates met in Philadelphia to draft the Constitution. In 2013, a test question about this lesson didn’t have key words such as constitution or delegates, educators said.

It read: “In 1787 the United States was at a crossroads. Farmers in western Massachusetts had rebelled the year before over property taxes. The state struggled to end the rebellion. Events such as this one contributed to the decision to —”

The answer choices are:

▪ sign the Treaty of Paris;

▪ repeal the Intolerable Acts;

▪ declare an embargo on imported goods;

▪ restructure the federal government.

Students who aren’t able to make the correct connection won’t know that the answer is to “restructure the federal government,” Carroll said.

“If they don’t know the technical vocabulary … then they are going to struggle with the same concepts being called by different terminology,” Carroll said.

This story was originally published July 15, 2016 at 5:45 PM with the headline "STAAR struggles: Fort Worth middle school students miss the mark."