2022 STAAR Prelim

DeSoto ISD Preliminary STAAR/EOC Data Indicate Possible B State Accountability Rating
Posted on 07/21/2022
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DeSoto Independent School District’s State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR®) / End-of-Course (EOC) assessments preliminary data showed promising gains that reflect the forward movement and progress of the district’s focus on student achievement.


The May 23, 2022 preliminary data presentation reported percentage increases in the categories of approaches, meets and masters levels from students throughout the District.


DeSoto ISD Executive Director of Research, Evaluation and Design Josh Newton shared that all of the category levels have significance clarifying that the “approaches” category represents passing; “meets” signifies students’ baseline grade level mastery of content; and “masters” reflects students’ advance performance, an indicator some correlate to college readiness.

 

District data shows significant increases in reading at every grade level, with slight increases in math. These most recent reading scores hover at or well above pre-pandemic levels.

 

While many districts throughout the state saw a pandemic related decline in student performance, DeSoto ISD staff members worked hard to combat its effects, resulting in student gains demonstrative of the District’s focus on forward progress. Based on this performance, the District is poised to receive a B accountability rating; an improvement from its 2019 pre-pandemic rating of a C or 78.


“This is why we do what we do,” said DeSoto ISD Board President DeAndrea Fleming following the presentation of the district’s preliminary data results at the May 23, 2022, board meeting.


The district saw notable gains in each area, with the only exception being a slight decrease in student performance for EOC U.S. History.


Of the Board of Trustees’ four student achievement goals, two of them are tied directly to STAAR performance for students in third grade:


  • Board Goal 2: Percentage of students at the Meets level on the 3rd grade STAAR reading exam increases from 25.0% in May 2019 to 65.0% by May 2025.

 

  • Board Goal 3: Percentage of students at the Meets level on the 3rd grade STAAR math exam  increases from 31.0% in May 2019 to 53.0% by May 2025.

With the Board of Trustees’ specific target for the 2021-2022 school year of 25%, the 2022 preliminary data shows third graders meeting state expectations for reading at 29.5%, up from 20.6% in 2021, resulting in an elevated goal difference of 4.5%.


In math, the Board of Trustees’ specific school year target was 31%, with 2022 preliminary data showing 19.5% which is more than double the 9% from 2021.


“I think we still have a lot of work to do. We’d like to see every one of our students at the ‘Meets Grade Level’ standard so there’s definitely some room for improvement,” Newton said. “I think that we’ve made some huge strides and doubled a lot of the learning loss that happened with the pandemic; I think we’ve bounced back from that some and shown that we have the students back in person and we were able to really build back some of those foundations to put us in a really strong point to continue mitigating that learning loss and pushing forward to meet board goals.”


Newton says the final data, a reflection of scores from students in DeSoto ISD’s accountability subset, will be posted online in August by the Texas Education Agency (TEA).