‘Completely different’
District officials presented Southside ISD’s projected letter grades at its Aug. 20 board meeting, a week after a judge blocked Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath from releasing the scores as planned.
The growing district of some 5,500 students expects a B on this year’s rankings, the same grade it received in 2022 but with a lower numerical score (81 compared with 88).
“While the district does not agree with all of the new accountability measures, for transparency purposes, it was important to share the results with our students, staff and parents,” Superintendent Rolando Ramirez said in a statement.
District officials calculated little change for most campuses, but a few schools were slated to drop a letter grade, including Southside High School and Gallardo Elementary, from a B to a C.
Jodi Spoor, Southside ISD’s assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, said the district’s STAAR scores showed improvements in academic growth “that is sometimes hard to distill down to one letter.”
“The last time we brought you scores in 2022, it was a completely different system, completely different test, so it was a lot harder to get this than it was back in 2022,” she said.
Perhaps the most criticized change this year was the TEA’s new use of an automated computer model to grade open-ended writing responses on the reading exam. While the agency attributed a rise in students who received a zero on their essay questions to a more difficult exam, the lawsuit argues that the spike raises questions about the technology.
At Southside ISD, 46% of students who took the essay portion of the exam received a zero.
Administrators put many of the responses through the district’s own computer grading system and found that “the program gave the same rating as the state or very close to it,” Ramirez said at the meeting.
“To be honest with the board, we checked the writing samples and, following the rubric, we found for the most part that students were off-topic,” he said. “In our case, it wasn’t the AI that caused it.”
The district will implement its computer grading across its campuses this year to prepare students for the next reading exam while also saving time for teachers and staff.
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