Can Confidence in the STAAR Test Get Any Lower?

Computers are handing out low scores (image via Getty Images)

The last time we checked in with our local school district, the trustees were pondering the connection between Austin ISD’s teaching goals and the state’s STAAR test. STAAR is the widely criticized assessment instrument used to grade students, schools, and whole school districts. At the board’s Sept. 26 meeting, the trustees discussed a new reason to question its value.

State lawmakers have redesigned STAAR repeatedly over the years; the newest version was implemented in the spring of 2023. STAAR 2.0, as district administrators are calling it, moves the battery of multiple choice questions. which had previously been answered with pencil and paper, completely online. It requires students taking the reading portion of the test to write essays. And it changes how the test is scored: a vast majority of the answers, including the essays, are now judged by artificial intelligence – a computer – not humans.

AISD administrator Dillon Finan summarized the most recent STAAR results in a presentation to the trustees, saying that a larger percentage of AISD students did well on the test this year. But the percentage of students who did poorly also rose. That rise comes overwhelmingly from economically disadvantaged students, Finan said, and correlates with the changes to STAAR 2.0.

Finan singled out one glaring detail: Large numbers of students across the state scored extremely poorly on the new essay portion of the test, which is referred to in Texas Education Agency bureaucratese as the “extended construction response.”

“What we are seeing is an overwhelming number of students earn zero out of a possible 10 points on the extended construction response,” Finan said. “36% of students across the state got a zero. 39% of students in Austin ISD got a zero. The test that was the worst this year was fifth grade – 48% of students across the state got a zero on the fifth-grade reading [exam]. I will say, going back to my teacher days, if I gave a test to students and these were my results, people would question the validity of my test.”

Finan said the STAAR results show that 846,231 of the state’s approximately 5 million students got zeros on their essays – one out of every six students. “Now let’s put that in perspective,” he continued. “A machine gave them a zero on their test, not a person. A machine decided their writing wasn’t worth a point. And when we look at Austin ISD, 11,703 students got a zero from a machine that said their writing was not worth a point.”

This, predictably, set off Trustee Kevin Foster. “It’s really difficult to make use of unreliable instruments,” Foster said. “I want to know how to move forward in the context of garbage tests and AI grading and thoroughly unreliable systems.”

Finan replied that STAAR isn’t useless, but that it shouldn’t be the only measure of student success (although it mostly is at present, especially in grades 3-8). At the same time, he implicitly acknowledged that the test is mandated by state law; there’s only so far the district can move away from it.

Superintendent Matias Segura expanded on Finan’s comments. “We need to acknowledge that there’s a system that we have to operate within, and that system is the state of Texas,” Segura said. “[STAAR] is something to be considered but certainly not something that should drive our instructional philosophy.”

Trustee Kathryn Whitley Chu, a former AISD teacher, urged the district to find another “north star” to guide its assessment of students. Foster returned to an idea he’s mentioned several times recently: the need to work within the self-sabotaging framework that state leaders have created for public education, while calling out the injustices of that framework and seeking escape routes from it.

“I’ve been Black for a long time,” Foster explained. “One aspect of the sociocultural and historical reality of being Black in this country is that you learn how to play the game without believing in it. And that’s kind of how I see this whole thing. We need to learn how to play this game without believing in it.”