Not Enough Austin ISD Seniors Are Ready for College, Per Recent Test Scores

Austin ISD administrators Angel Wilson, Creslond Fannin, and Dillon Finan -Screenshot via Austin ISD

There’s a disturbing statistic the Austin ISD Board of Trustees is all too aware of. Research shows young adults without a postsecondary credential have just a 12% chance of earning a living wage within six years of leaving high school. In Travis County, a graduate with no kids needs to make about $24 an hour to earn a living wage.

Creslond Fannin, Austin ISD’s executive director of Early College High School, cited the statistic at the March 7 school board meeting. She continued, “It really focuses in on why TSI is so important.”

TSI stands for Texas Success Initiative, a state program mandating that Texas institutions of higher education assess prospective students for college readiness – specifically, whether they are prepared for college-level courses in English and mathematics. The test that makes the determination is called the TSIA 2, but students can be exempted from taking it if they score well on the SAT or ACT. Austin ISD has several goals associated with these assessments. Among them, they aim to raise the percentage of graduates who meet the TSI criteria in English and math from 52% in August 2021 to 56% by the end of this school year.

Dillon Finan, an Austin ISD data analyst, said February testing data shows 51.7% of tested high schoolers have met the criteria so far this year. That’s 4.3% (or 190 students) shy of the goal. But he said the percentage is likely to go up in the next two months. In February of last school year, only 43% of tested seniors had met TSI criteria, but the number was 53% by the end of the year. “If we see similar trends in this academic school year, we are on track to meet and possibly exceed our end-of-the-year goal of 56 percent,” Finan said.

It was one of the only glimmers of positivity to be found in recent test results. But even if test scores do improve this spring, Finan said that 12th grade Black and Hispanic students, particularly those who are economically disadvantaged, are underperforming compared to other student groups, and there is a continuing decline in meeting TSI criteria for emergent bilingual 12th graders.

The administrators identified several root causes for the low performance. Fannin stressed the district needs a comprehensive case management system to intervene for students at the appropriate time. She said the schools’ curriculum resources are limited and misaligned, noting that “we’re teaching one thing and then we’re testing on something different.” And she said that some kids are arriving in high school with pronounced deficits in reading and math, which teachers in the higher grades aren’t trained to address. On top of case management, she urged partnerships with groups like Communities in Schools, which runs the Male Student Achievement Program.

In the discussion that followed, Trustee David Kauffman homed in on the data showing that some kids are arriving in high school with reading deficits. “When a student doesn’t meet the TSIA score cutoff for reading, does that mean they can’t read?” Kauffman asked. “I mean, is this test truly an indicator that our kids are lacking the basic literacy that we owe them, or are there other factors that lead to students not passing the reading test?”

Angel Wilson, assistant superintendent of secondary schools, did not offer a yes or no answer but said the challenges for Black and emergent bilingual students are very real. She said the district is working to implement small group instruction and revising instruction methods by updating curricula in Bowie, Webb, and Burnet middle schools, where 34% of the district’s roughly 4,600 emergent bilingual middle-schoolers are concentrated.

At the end of the discussion, Board President Arati Singh questioned the assertion that the district is on track to reach 56% TSI compliance by the end of the school year. “I think we have to be really careful about the words we use, because when we say we’re 'on track,’ we’re ignoring half the population of our school district, that is actually not on track,” Singh said. “I’m super-excited about the things I heard but I just want to be really, really careful because I’ve been on this board when we’ve patted ourselves on the back and there were vast groups of children that were failing, and so we were failing. And I don’t want to get back into that old pattern.”

Singh proposed that the board accept the report on TSI progress but strike the “on track” language. The board approved unanimously.