District files complaint over teacher's administration of STAAR retests

A complaint was filed against a teacher with the State Board for Educator Certification (SBEC) following allegations that the teacher gave prohibited assistance to students when she orally administered State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR) retests in May 2017 and May 2018. The teacher requested a hearing before the State Office of Administrative Hearings to contest the proposed imposition of sanctions on her teacher certificate.

At the hearing, the evidence presented showed that the teacher administered the May 2017 STAAR Grade 5 reading retest to 14 students who had failed that year’s primary administration. The retest was orally administered as an accommodation for students’ special education needs. After failing to meet grade level during the primary administration, which was not administered by the teacher, all but one of the students achieved a passing score on the reading retest. The following year, the teacher administered the STAAR Grade 5 math retest to nine students. All of these students had scored Did Not Meet grade level on the primary administration, which the teacher had not administered, but six of them scored passing scores on the teacher’s math retest.

During the 2017-18 school year, the teacher’s former fifth grade students matriculated to middle school. Over the course of the school year, a sixth grade English teacher developed concerns that despite having passed the STAAR Grade 5 reading test the year before, a number of her students were not reading at or near grade level. When that teacher examined their testing records, she realized that the struggling students had all received their passing STAAR scores from the reading retest the other teacher had orally administered. The sixth grade teacher reported her concerns to the district, and the district testing coordinator initiated an investigation that was eventually expanded to include the May 2018 STAAR Grade 5 math retest as well.

TEA’s Student Assessment Division further analyzed the students’ longitudinal STAAR scores and determined that all 14 students who passed the teacher’s May 2017 Grade 5 reading retest failed the STAAR Grade 6 reading test the following year. Likewise, all but one of the nine students who passed the teacher’s May 2018 Grade 5 math retest failed the STAAR Grade 6 math test the next year.

At the hearing, the district's director of testing testified that most students who fail the first administration of the STAAR test will also earn a Did Not Meet on the retest. Some may improve their score to Approaches, but to see several students jump from Did Not Meet to Meets or Masters on the math retest was “an anomaly in the data that we usually don’t see for that second administration.” She also asserted that if the students truly had improved that significantly, the gains should have been reflected on the following year’s STAAR tests as well.

During the investigation, the district interviewed students who had taken the retests with the teacher. The students gave inconsistent responses to questions and on many occasions could not even remember who had administered the test. When the investigator read them a few STAAR questions from a released test, the students seemed unfamiliar with the math concepts and vocabulary used in the questions they were given. 

The director of testing testified that students who had passed the STAAR test, as these students had, should not have had difficulty understanding and answering the questions. She also testified that some of the students seemed unable to hold basic conversations or even chat about what class they had come from or were headed to after their interview. She testified that most of the students had “a low cognitive ability” that did not correspond to the abilities expected of a student who had passed the STAAR.

The district then interviewed the teacher who had administered the oral retests. During the first meeting, she volunteered that her voice inflection might have impacted the students’ answers on the retests. She was then asked to give investigators a written statement, which she provided a few days after the first interview.  In it, she denied providing any inappropriate assistance to students on any of the retests. She said she had read the test questions with neutral inflection in her normal teaching voice, “which is not at all monotone, but loud and clear.”

The district determined that the investigation was inconclusive as to the reasons for the anomaly in the students’ scores, noting that although it may have occurred due to assistance from the teacher, there had not been sufficient evidence to make a determination that assistance was provided. However, it made a report to TEA because there was “too big of an anomaly in the data” to not characterize it as a serious testing irregularity.

After hearing the evidence presented at the hearing, the administrative law judge concluded that the only logical conclusion that could be drawn from the evidence is that the scores achieved by students on the oral STAAR retests administered by the teacher were inaccurate and unreliable, reflecting a level of achievement that the students were never actually able to reach. The administrative law judge concluded that the inaccurate scores mean that the teacher somehow administered the tests in a way that violated the integrity of those assessments. 

However, the evidence was inconclusive regarding what the violation of test administration was. District investigators found that the evidence was not sufficient to make a determination that assistance was provided. TEA staff presented no additional evidence at the hearing that could tip the scales and there was no evidence introduced at the hearing about what happened in the testing rooms that could have caused the anomalous test results. The teacher did admit to investigators that students might have been influenced by her tone of voice when she read the STAAR tests to them. However, she also denied that her tone could have revealed any test answers. If some other type of improper assistance was given to students, there was no evidence introduced to reveal what it could have been. TEA’s investigation did not reveal that the teacher had tampered with the students’ test booklets or changed their answers. There is also no evidence that the teacher engaged in any other forms of improper assistance like pointing to correct answers, making facial expressions to indicate approval or disapproval of a response, or defining words for students.
 
The administrative law judge concluded that the evidence proved that there was some type of irregularity in the teacher’s oral STAAR test administration that led to invalid results, but the administrative law judge could draw no conclusions about the nature of that irregularity. However, as the person charged with ensuring the test was properly administered, the teacher is ultimately responsible for any irregularity. Therefore, her certificate was subject to sanctions. Based on the lack of evidence to support a finding that the teacher deliberately provided inappropriate assistance to students in order to cheat on the exam, the administrative law judge recommended that the teacher receive a probated, one-year suspension and be barred from future STAAR test administrations.