The Texas Education Agency (TEA) recently released spring 2022 State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR®) results for grades 3-8 and End-of-Course (EOC) results for grades 9-12. Overall, STAAR performance improved from last year in every Tyler ISD elementary and middle school. And at all levels of proficiency, scores went up at least 5% in every grade in 3-8 Reading, showing the highest results in years.
Compared to 2021, Tyler ISD had more students achieve the passing standard (“Approaches”) in 14/15 elementary and middle school subjects. In eight of these subjects, the percent of students who achieved the “Approaches” standard improved by at least 5% with three of those subjects seeing at least 10% more students passing than the prior year.
Despite struggles seen by many districts since the pandemic, Tyler ISD had the same or a higher percentage of students pass than the state average in five subjects. “I think we can attribute the 2021-2022 year’s success back to the fall semester of 2020,” Superintendent Dr. Marty Crawford said. “We had a reasonable plan to bring all students back to in-person learning quicker than any district of our size and larger. We had structures in place for the health and safety of teachers, staff, and students, so we could learn together in classrooms instead of relying on long-term virtual systems.”
Crawford added, “TEA compares STAAR results among grade levels each year, for example, last year’s fifth graders compared to this year’s fifth graders. In Tyler ISD, we take the data and gauge the growth of individual students and groups of students instead of constantly comparing them to last year’s students with completely different characteristics. We look to see if our students are growing individually and within their grade-level cohorts for the goals we would like to see them achieve for successful student outcomes.”
More changes to STAAR are coming in the 2022-23 school year. TEA is implementing changes from House Bill 3906 (86R) that require STAAR to be redesigned to better align with classroom instruction. These changes aim to improve student engagement and eliminate instruction that is solely directed toward test preparation. These changes, which will not alter the test’s difficulty, will be fully in effect by the spring 2023 test administration.
For more information, contact Jennifer Hines at Jennifer.Hines@TylerISD.org.