Superintendent Matias Segura at the Sept. 12 board meeting (Screenshot via Austin ISD)
Austin ISD is finishing up a complex project that the board of trustees will be glad to be done with – the revision of the district’s “scorecard.”
For those of you reading this who aren’t teachers, administrators, or obsessively plugged-in parents, AISD’s scorecard is a list of the district’s major goals. It covers a period of five years and, in the past, has included close to 20 items, many focused on improving learning for economically disadvantaged students. But when the Texas Education Agency began overseeing the district’s provision of special education last year, it insisted AISD whittle its scorecard goals to no more than five. Those five were presented to the board on Sept. 12, and they mostly center around standardized test scores.
Here they are, in paraphrased form:
1. The percentage of 3rd-graders who score “meets grade level” (Texas education lingo roughly approximating “satisfactory”) or above on the end-of-year STAAR test will increase from this year’s number of 47% to 59% by June 2029.
2. The percentage of 3rd-graders who earn “meets grade level” or above on the STAAR math test will increase from this year’s 39% to 55% by June 2029.
3. The percentage of high school graduates who show they are ready for college or a career by passing the Texas Success Initiative test (and earning an associate’s degree during high school, enrolling for college, or showing readiness for a career through other means) will increase from 43.7% for the class of 2022 to 54.6% for the class of 2027.
4. The percentage of economically disadvantaged students who take Algebra I in middle school and score “meets grade level” or above on the STAAR test for the course will increase from 53% this year to 64% by June 2029.
5. The percentage of graduates who are formally recognized as bilingual and biliterate will increase from this year’s 10.3% to 11.8% by June 2029.
You will notice that the goals are written in a declarative style and employ measurable criteria, not vague feel-good language. You will also notice that three of them use the term “meets grade level,” one of several possible scores on the STAAR test which, according to TEA, denotes that a student has a high likelihood of success in the next grade or course. TEA determines how many students meet grade level by arranging STAAR scores into a bell curve, something that teachers and parents say causes many kids to be judged as failures.
Trustee Kathryn Whitley Chu pointed out at Thursday’s meeting that, according to TEA’s own website, a 3rd grade student must score in the 60th percentile, better than half of their peers, to achieve “meets grade level.” She added that TEA’s bell curve makes it impossible for all of the state’s students as a whole to meet expectations in any given subject.
“How disheartening would it be to think that, oh, my child doesn’t meet expectations when they are doing as well as the average student,” Whitley Chu said. “This has nothing to do with them being on grade level.”
The fact that AISD’s scorecard is yoked to the state’s STAAR test and TEA’s data manipulation bothered other trustees too, helping to push what was supposed to be a 10-minute discussion past the two-hour mark. But the trustees seemed to acknowledge that there is no other data to work with at the present time.
Superintendent Matias Segura was sympathetic to the criticisms of the STAAR and TEA, saying the scorecard is just one way to improve student outcomes and mentioning the importance of increasing the budget, streamlining district operations, and launching specific initiatives.
“I think those things will ultimately, over time, be a better way to get us where we want to be,” Segura said. “I do not want to create environments where we’re overemphasizing high stakes testing.”