HOUSTON – New STAAR exam data released by Houston ISD Tuesday reveals academic growth across the district this year.
The STAAR exams are the State of Texas indicator for how proficient students are in a given subject area. The assessment is administered only once a year and while it is only a snapshot of proficiency, HISD says the results indicate that many more students are meeting or exceeding grade-level standards in most tested subjects. Typically, one to two points in proficiency growth on STAAR is acceptable growth. At the District level, an increase of three or more percentage points over the previous year’s score is strong growth.
The data encompasses the 3rd through 8th grade STAAR exam results, following last week’s release of high school results. These exams serve as key indicators used by the state to assess student proficiency in various subjects.
KPRC 2′s Candace Burns had an exclusive one-on-one interview with Superintendent Miles to discuss the results.
The entire district saw academic growth according to the data, but NES schools posted even higher gains than the district average.
Candace Burns: Can you talk about how HISD students did with this most recent STAAR exam, especially in comparison to previous years?
Mike Miles: The short answer is our students did great. Now we are behind the state on proficiency. We know that we’re a large urban district, and most of them are behind the state average, but we’re going to try to get to the state average, and then pass the state average to the national average. And then we’re going to beat the national average.
Mike Miles: Over the last 5 or 6 years, our achievement has been going down. It’s a little uneven, right? It’s not like every grade; every one of those 20 exams is a straight-up decline. But as a group, yes, our achievement was going down. And that’s one of the reasons why we had an intervention.
Candace Burns: So, in one year, we’re seeing almost like a turnaround.
Mike Miles: One year doesn’t make a trend. But we have stopped the decline and we have turned the corner and we’re moving up. We didn’t close the gap with the state; we’re still behind the state. I want everybody to understand that. When you talk about an increase in proficiency, last year 40% of kids could read at grade level; now it’s 49%. That’s a 9% increase in the number of kids who can read at grade level, for example.
Candace Burns: The district as a whole saw growth. We understand why NES schools would see growth due to the transformations on those campuses. But what accounts for the growth in the other schools that were not part of NES?
Mike Miles: At the end of the day, I think people actually stepped up. We put a focus on high-quality instruction. Every school was impacted in that way. Principals were coaching, teachers were doing observations, and we aligned on what high-quality instruction looks like. We started a culture of high performance. We did some of the basic things that effective districts do. I think those things helped push us forward and gave us progress, even in the non-NES schools.
The full results can be seen in the embed below: