HISD told not to focus on STAAR prep

Teachers, directed to continue usual lessons, worry any low scores may affect evaluations

As Houston ISD students prepare to take the STAAR in less than two weeks, Superintendent Mike Miles is instructing schools to avoid direct test preparation, instead telling principals to have their teachers focus on daily lessons as usual.

The directive is a departure from the norm at many HISD schools, according to multiple district teachers and administrators, who say the weeks leading up to the exam usually included reviews of key concepts, mock tests and sometimes even “STAAR Olympics,” which included educational games to make test prep more engaging.

Miles laid out his instructions last Wednesday in his weekly email to principals, the information in which applies to all schools in HISD “unless specifically called out.”

“Neither the STAAR exams nor the NWEA and EOY assessments should be overemphasized for teachers and students,” the state-appointed leader wrote in the email, which was obtained by the Houston Chronicle. “Teachers should focus on the curriculum and the quality of instruction. Students should focus on the (Demonstrations of Learning) and learning the objective for the day every day.”

“Direct instruction and a reasonable amount of (differentiated instruction) spent reviewing key concepts is OK. However, there should be little test prep — whereby students take a series of assessments to prepare for STAAR or NWEA,” Miles wrote.

Erin Baumgartner, the director of the Houston Education Research Consortium at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, said that the legacy of No Child Left Behind, the federal legislation signed in 2002 that required states to implement standardized tests, has made test prep standard practice at schools nationwide.

While mock exams and other strategies can help familiarize students with the format and presentation of a standardized test, she said, there is no evidence that explicit test prep nec

essarily leads to greater outcomes on the assessment itself.

“If test prep isn’t something that necessarily is shown to work, then it shouldn’t matter too much whether schools are doing a lot of it or not, but it’s become the norm,” Baumgartner said.

Though the value of standardized tests has been the subject of intense debate across the country, the importance typically placed on training reflects the practical ramifications of the STAAR exam — test scores are a major factor in determining schools’ statewide accountability ratings, and will account for a significant portion of administrators’ and teachers’ evaluations under Miles’ leadership, directly affecting administrators’ pay next year.

Those accountability ratings are among the factors that allowed the Texas Education Agency to appoint Miles and a board of managers to lead the district last year. One of the criteria to return HISD to local control is that no campus receive a D or F on its state rating for multiple years.

HISD officials said the “expectation is that every HISD student receives high-quality grade level instruction in every classroom every day,” and that “as a result, schools should not need to do anything differently to prepare for assessments.” They noted that campuses can provide additional preparation time, such as Saturday clinics, at their own discretion, but that HISD has not issued formal guidance on the subject.

“The guidance for all campuses leading up to STAAR and the end of year NWEA assessments is to continue with that quality, grade-level instruction on their campus,” the district said in a statement.

Evaluation fears

Some teachers and administrators expressed frustration with the directive and fear it could unfairly impact their evaluations, arguing it limits their ability to prepare students for a unique assessment they only take once a year. Even staunch opponents of standardized testing, such as Community Voices for Public Education co-founder Ruth Kravetz, said the lack of direct preparation could harm students and schools, given the high stakes associated with the results.

Kravetz, a former HISD teacher and administrator, said that the online-only format of the recently redesigned STAAR makes it necessary to familiarize students with the assessment before its administered, pointing to a Houston Public Media report that revealed 46% of fourth graders scored a zero out of 10 on the writing portion of the STAAR in 2023, the first year the new test was implemented.

“I can’t believe I have to argue for letting students review so they don’t go in cold. The fix is in at the front end and the back end, and that’s not the way we’re supposed to treat schoolchildren,” Kravetz said.

Though Miles has discouraged direct test preparation, another email obtained by the Houston Chronicle suggests that HISD’s curriculum writers are incorporating preparation strategies into the district’s daily lesson plans, which some principals were encouraged to explore leading up to STAAR. The developments come as schools undergo a third round of formal instructional reviews during the first three weeks of April, the data from which will be used in employees’ year-end evaluations.

HISD officials said that “nonNES campus administrators were provided the scope and sequence of the NES curriculum as an optional resource” and are not mandated to use it.

Prep included in lessons

In the email to principals in one high school feeder pattern, an executive director said that HISD’s curriculum team would be incorporating reviews of key concepts into daily lessons, which include mini-assessments at the end of each class known as Demonstrations of Learning.

Those DOLs will now include an increase in the kinds of writing prompts that students will see on the STAAR, according to the email, and will be available online on certain days.

That email notes, however, that mock tests and STAAR questions from previous years are still not allowed.

Critics of Miles’ administration have long decried the district’s centrally developed curriculum as “endless test prep” and have pushed district leaders for years to de-emphasize the STAAR test. They believe, however, that flaws in HISD’s materials — which can range from grammatical errors to misalignments between questions and their subject matter — make them ill-equipped to prepare students for a test with such important consequences.

“It does function like yearround test prep, so it’s the worst of both possible worlds,” Kravetz said. “Even assuming that test prep all year was reasonable, it has to align with what the child is being tested on.”

STAAR End-of-Course assessments for high schoolers begin Thursday, and the reading and language arts portion of STAAR begins for elementary and middle school students the following week. Testing in other subjects continues intermittently throughout the rest of the month, and ends with the math portions of the exams on April 30 and May 1.

Students will take NWEA MAP tests, which measure their growth throughout the year, between May 14 and May 16.