Fort Worth ISD leaders presented an encouraging trend to the school board and City Council: Students in kindergarten through eighth grade showed academic growth on a midyear test.
Some experts and education advocates say that trend should be expected in the middle of the school year. The data, they said, shows Fort Worth ISD students are behind national averages — and likely won’t catch up.
Robert Rogers, president of the Reading League of Texas, noticed a different trend in the data that he thinks the school board should be more concerned about: the gap between the district and national reading and math averages that widens with each successive grade level after kindergarten.
Rogers has spent 15 years tutoring Fort Worth ISD students on reading and advocating for better literacy instruction. Students need more support than ever, he said, even as they show growth in performance.
“If we present information like this with enthusiasm and say, ‘This is great news. We’re growing,’ it takes away the opportunity to see the change that needs to happen,” Rogers said.
‘We’ve got to be exceeding that’
The numbers were based on student performance on the Northwest Evaluation Association Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, a test tracking academic growth that is administered at the beginning, middle and end of the school year.
The test is intended to help teachers adjust lessons according to students’ needs.
“What I’d like to point out is that every single grade level had growth from the beginning of the year to the middle of the year,” Superintendent Angélica Ramsey told Fort Worth City Council members. “It’s great news for the city of Fort Worth.”
Growth on a midyear test should be an expectation, not a point of celebration, Rogers said.
“If they’re growing in reading but not growing at the national norm, we’re falling behind,” Rogers said. “If we’re going to have meaningful growth, we’ve got to be exceeding that.”
Fort Worth ISD has not moved the needle on the state’s standardized test, called the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR. The exam is used as a marker for school and district performance because it looks at students' mastery of a variety of subjects.
Students recently completed their 2024 STAAR exams. Results are expected later in the summer.
The two tests are correlated. Performance on the MAP exam is an indicator of how a student may perform on the state standardized test.
Fort Worth ISD’s midyear MAP scores in second through eighth grades in reading and math are below grade level, according to a Fort Worth Report analysis.
The Report compared the midyear test scores to a 2020 study that linked the exam to STAAR. The study presented a scale that showed the minimum MAP score that would qualify as meeting grade level. NWEA is updating the study because Texas revised its standardized test.
Interpreting MAP scores
Texas Christian University professor Jo Beth Jimerson, a former Comal ISD teacher and assistant principal, said that while Fort Worth ISD students do fall behind national average, there’s still hope and potential for improvement in the data. Teachers can, and should, use MAP scores to influence the rate of student achievement and make changes to classroom instruction on a student-by-student or classwide basis.
“MAP can be likened to a coach on the sideline during a game, providing real-time insights that need adjustments, while the STAAR is more like the box score after the game, showing the results," Jimerson said. Teachers use the data to know what they need to adjust from one semester to the next, she said.
Still, she said, the data can be confusing even for teachers, as growth in MAP scores is a different type of growth than what’s represented by STAAR. MAP growth tracks individual student growth over time, whatever their starting point and regardless of their grade level.
For instance, if a third-grade student is actually reading on the fifth-grade level, MAP will be able to identify that, and vice versa.
“If teachers get training, the professional learning and the time they need, they can use these scores in really rich ways,” Jimerson said.
Confusion surrounds MAP data
Just as teachers are likely to be confused by how best to interpret MAP data, Jimerson said, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that city leaders have had difficulty understanding the data.
During Ramsey’s presentation to the City Council, Mayor Mattie Parker noticed the national averages in the superintendent’s slides detailing MAP scores.
“I realize this is not an apples-to-apples question, but I’m curious: The national average for, let’s say, first grade is 166. Does that mean at 166, those students across the United States are at grade level, or is that just simply saying that’s the national average?” Parker asked.
The test does not have a grade-level comparative, Ramsey told the mayor.
“What it measures is an individual student’s ability to get harder and harder questions with higher difficulty levels correct,” Ramsey said, noting the test changes based on students’ answers.
Parker wasn’t the only city leader with questions.
Council member Carlos Flores questioned when measurable gains become actual grade-level achievement.
“The state test, both in reading and math, are content tests, and a lot of people confuse reading on grade level on the test, thinking that it means whether a student is reading on grade level or not,” Ramsey responded. “It’s a content test. They’re standards.”
School board members asked similar questions at a special meeting. Fort Worth ISD trustees Kevin Lynch and Anael Luebanos, both of whom have children enrolled in the district, asked how MAP scores compare to meeting grade level.
An NWEA representative told trustees her company’s test does not detail whether students are meeting grade level. Instead, results describe “the edge of achievement,” so teachers can adjust their instruction, the official said.
“I have several kids in the district and see MAP reports come home. I’m just trying to make sense of this data,” Lynch said.
Flores has two children attending Fort Worth ISD. He finds MAP test results confusing, he told the superintendent.
“I consider myself reasonably informed but, at times, I even have difficulty wrapping my head around all that information presented,” Flores said.
Other parents, he said, feel this way, too.
Jacob Sanchez is an enterprise journalist for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at jacob.sanchez@fortworthreport.org or @_jacob_sanchez.
Matthew Sgroi is an education reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at matthew.sgroi@fortworthreport.org or @MatthewSgroi1 on X.
At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
