With glitches and students opting out, how useful will STAAR be in identifying COVID-19 learning loss?
Texas schools need accurate data to diagnose student learning loss
A recent STAAR test booklet for seventh-grade math.( / Texas Education Agency)
Education leaders are desperate to quantify how much the COVID-19 pandemic has hampered students’ learning, saying that’s a key step in figuring out how to catch kids up.
They hope the STAAR test gives them an idea. But the student data stemming from this pandemic year will come with several caveats, namely because thousands of students won’t take the test either because they opted out or aren’t regularly attending school. And when Texas’ online testing system glitched out last week, it triggered yet another complication.