About a dozen districts will see a bump in school accountability ratings on Tuesday after a manual rescoring of thousands of STAAR tests improved some results.<\/p>\n
Texas Education Agency officials said Friday about 27,200 students received additional credit for their text responses to some questions on the reading portion of the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness. The adjustments impacted some sixth through eighth graders, as well as those who took the English I end-of-course exam.<\/p>\n
The affected districts consist of Chester<\/a>, Crandall<\/a>, Daingerfield-Lone Star<\/a>, Floydada Collegiate<\/a>, Forney<\/a>, Fredericksburg<\/a>, Galveston<\/a>, Jim Hogg County<\/a>, Odem-Edroy<\/a>, Southwest<\/a> and Walnut Bend<\/a> ISDs, agency spokesperson Jake Kobersky said.<\/p>\n Nine campuses and five districts saw their A-F rating increases as a result, officials said.<\/p>\n In December 2023, the TEA began using a computer-automated process<\/a> to grade open-ended questions on the STAAR, including on the reading and English exams, with humans manually reviewing at least a quarter of exam scores. However, Kobersky said none of the regraded responses were graded by its \u201cautomated scoring engine.\u201d<\/p>\n The changed scores came as part of an annual review of test scores. Content experts rescored \u201ctext entry\u201d responses, where students type brief text \u2014 such as a number, word, or phrase. The automated model reviews short and extended constructed-response questions, which ask students to provide longer answers.<\/p>\n About 1.7% of more than 1.6 million exams reviewed saw scores improve, although not all increases directly led to improved A-F ratings for schools, agency officials said. <\/p>\n In Galveston ISD<\/a>, Central Middle School \u2014 which initially earned a D this year \u2014 will see its rating increase by six points to a 75 after the rescoring, according to records from the TEA that the district provided to The Texas Tribune. A spokesperson for the 6,671-student district declined a request to comment on the increase. <\/p>\n