The Houston school board received a a briefing Monday on how elementary and middle school students fared on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness. As has been the trend in HISD and the state, scores generally improved in math and declined in reading from 2013 to 2014. The board did not get briefed Monday about school-level results, but they varied widely, with some scores far below the district average.
Here’s a look at the three-year district-level STAAR trends in reading and math under HISD Superintendent Terry Grier. The scores include students who took the English version and those who took the Spanish version of the STAAR exams. (Bear with me — I’m experimenting with with graphing tools.)
The biggest drop, 6 percentage points, was in third-grade reading. The largest gains, by the same amount, were in math in grades 5 and 7.
The report to the school board said a policy change impacted the seventh- and eighth-grade math scores. In 2013, advanced seventh-graders took the eighth-grade math test. In 2014, those seventh-graders took the seventh-grade test. “This policy change had a positive impact on the grade 7 mathematics results and an adverse impact on the grade 8 results in 2014,” the report said.
For all scores, Carla Stevens, HISD’s superintendent of research, said the 2014 results likely were not impacted by the district’s annexation of the low-performing North Forest school district because of the relatively small percentage of students there.
The results reflect the state’s easiest passing standards. If the Texas Education Agency had put the tougher standards in place, requiring students to answer more questions correctly to pass, HISD’s passing rates would be roughly half as high.