Texas school districts asked the state to rescore 64,489 written responses on this spring’s STAAR reading exams, nearly three times the 21,620 requests a year earlier, according to Texas Education Agency data reported by the Texas Tribune. In spring 2024, there were 2,758.
The rescores changed results. The state raised more than 13,300 reading scores after review. Computers had graded 58 percent of those responses the first time, and humans 42 percent. Every rescore was done by a person.
Since December 2023, TEA has graded open-ended STAAR answers with what it calls a hybrid model. An automated scoring engine scores every response first, and at least 25 percent are then routed to trained human scorers to check the machine, according to the agency’s published scoring process. Districts can pay to have a response rescored by a person. The $50 fee is waived if the score changes.
More than 250 districts and charter networks requested rescores this year, including Cypress-Fairbanks, Dallas, Katy and Northside. Nearly 90 percent had at least one exam come back with a higher score, the Tribune reported. Dallas ISD sent more than 5,100 tests, and 34 percent returned higher. The district said the combined rescores lifted five campuses’ A-F ratings before the state released them, one from a D to a C and four from C to B.
The ratings carry weight. Campuses are rated on how many students reach each performance level, and repeated low ratings can lead the education commissioner to install a conservator or replace an elected school board.
TEA says the system works. Scoring every essay by hand would take four to five times as many scorers and cost an extra $15 million to $20 million a year, agency spokesperson Jake Kobersky told the Tribune. He said the hybrid model “keeps human judgment at the center of scoring.” Fewer than 0.5 percent of open-ended reading responses changed in all.
Rachel White, an education policy professor at the University of Texas at Austin, read the numbers differently. “The tripling of requests to me says educators who read their students’ essays are increasingly disagreeing with the scores that are assigned,” she said.
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