Despite gains, Fort Worth students lag behind pre-pandemic STAAR test scores, report shows

Although students have made significant gains over the past year, Fort Worth schools’ performance on last spring’s state exams still lagged behind the numbers they posted in 2019, before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report.

The director of the nonprofit Fort Worth Education Partnership, which compiled the report, told Fort Worth city councilors Tuesday the results show that schools in the city still have work to do to get students back on track. While he applauded the efforts of teachers and school leaders to help students make up ground they lost during the pandemic, Brent Beasley noted students in the city still scored below grade level two-thirds of the time on last spring’s state tests.

“When you see the school buses lined up for drop-off in the morning, we have to kind of face the reality that two out of every three of those buses are full of kids who are not meeting grade level,” Beasley said.

Education of Fort Worth kids is ‘a city-wide issue,’ says nonprofit director

The nonprofit advocates for high-quality schools in Fort Worth. It has assisted national charter schools looking to move into Tarrant County.

The report looks at the percentage of time students in grades 3-8 in the 12 school districts and 15 charter networks that operate in the Fort Worth city limits met grade level standards on last spring’s State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, exams. It looks at all subjects tested — math, reading, science, social studies and writing — in the aggregate, comparing performance on this year’s state test to schools’ results in 2021 and 2019. State testing was canceled in 2020 due to the pandemic.

Beasley told councilors the report was designed to give them a broader, more complete look at how the city schools are performing. Although the Fort Worth Independent School District is home to the largest single share of students in the city, only about 44% go to schools in the district. So looking at a single district won’t show an accurate picture of the entire city.

“The education of Fort Worth kids is not a Fort Worth ISD issue,” he said. “It is a city-wide issue.”

The good news is that students in every council district in the city made progress compared to last year. The bad news is that students in nearly every council district still lag behind where they were in the spring of 2019, before the pandemic reached Texas. Only in Council District 3, which covers parts of western and southwestern Fort Worth, did students perform at their 2019 levels. In that district, students scored on grade level 39% of the time, the same percentage as they did in 2019.

In districts 5 and 8, which cover neighborhoods in southeastern and eastern Fort Worth with higher concentrations of poverty, students performed only a few points worse than the 2019 levels, but still lagged well behind the district average. In District 5, which spans much of southeastern and eastern Fort Worth, students performed on grade level 27% of the time, down one point from 2019. In District 8, which primarily covers southeastern Fort Worth, students scored on grade level a quarter of the time, down two points from before the pandemic.

In Fort Worth ISD, 38% of third-graders met grade-level standards in reading on last spring’s exams, according to figures released in July by the Texas Education Agency — an improvement not only over last year, but also over 2019, before the pandemic began.

In math, 27% of third-graders in the district met grade level this year. That’s an improvement over the 15% who met grade level last year, but still lags behind the 32% who met grade level in 2019.

National report shows ‘sobering’ declines in reading and math

Tuesday’s report mirrors nationwide trends. National test results released Sept. 1 show the largest decline in reading scores in decades and the first-ever decline in math scores since the assessment began in the 1970s.

Those findings come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ long-term trend assessment for 9-year-olds. The report compares scores on exams taken in 2022 with those administered in the winter of 2020, shortly before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Average reading scores on the assessment declined by five points nationwide during that period, the largest decline since 1990. Scores in math declined by seven points.

Although average math scores dropped among students in all demographic groups, declines were sharpest among Black and Hispanic students, according to the report. Math scores declined by five points among white students, 13 points among Black students and eight points among Hispanic students, according to the report. That disparity increased the performance gap between Black and white students by eight points, according to the report.

In reading, scores among Black, white and Hispanic students declined by six points, according to the report. Across all racial and ethnic groups, scores among the highest-performing students showed little change.

In a statement, Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said the results “paint a sobering picture.” She noted that American schools and the students they serve face a host of challenges that likely contributed to the declines.

“School shootings, violence, and classroom disruptions are up, as are teacher and staff vacancies, absenteeism, cyberbullying, and students’ use of mental health services,” Carr said. “This information provides some important context for the results we’re seeing from the long-term trend assessment.”