Mendez Middle School students see mixed results on 2024 STAAR tests. Here's how they scored

In Bianca Rocha’s class at Mendez Middle School on a recent Friday, summer school students squinted at a smart board while she explained to them how to find the surface area of a prism.

Rocha set a timer as she talked through a mock test question asking students to figure out how much paint to buy for a rectangular building. The students called out answers or wrote them on their smart boards.

“Please take your time on this,” Rocha told the students, handing out a packet. “Don’t rush through it. It’s a lot of math.”

While students at Mendez, a struggling Austin school district campus, took significant academic leaps during their first year under a turnaround charter company, progress on the state’s end of year exams showed a mixed bag this year, according to data released last month.

Officials with Third Future Schools, the charter company overseeing Mendez as part of a state plan to improve the campus's academic scores, noted that students have grown academically even if their grade-level performance still doesn’t measure up.

More seventh graders passed this year’s reading State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness Test, according to information released June 14. However, those same students performed more poorly on math compared with the previous year.

This year 61% of seventh graders passed the reading STAAR test compared with 58% last year, and 41% passed the math STAAR test compared with 46% last year.

Eighth graders passed their reading STAAR test at the same rate as last year — 56% — but dipped slightly in math — from 70% to 68%, according to data from the Texas Education Agency.

Eighth graders' scores also plummeted in science and in social studies tests, which seventh graders don’t take.

Only 28% of Mendez students passed the science exam this year, compared with 52% last year. And only 25% of students passed the social studies test this year, compared with 37% last year, according to TEA data.

Third Future has been running Mendez since 2022. The Austin district entered into an agreement with Third Future through a state-approved program in an attempt to avoid harsher state sanctions on the chronically failing campus.

Although the academic gaps persist, students have grown significantly, Principal Jeremiah Willis said.

Students exhibited between 1.5 and 3.4 years of growth, depending on the grade and subject, according to data from Third Future. A typical student exhibits a year of growth in one school year.

“I think it’s encouraging for the kids to see that progress,” Willis said. “We do a good job of messaging: ‘Hey, it’s about the progress and the journey as opposed to the where you are compared to your peers.’”

The middle school has identified areas of improvement to address.

Vocabulary has proven a particular challenge for the science curriculum in a school where a majority of the students are emergent bilingual learners, Willis said.

Almost 60% of Mendez students are emergent bilingual learners.

“We have to continue to figure out a way to break that barrier down when it comes to vocabulary,” Willis said.

Willis also pointed to challenges in math with student comprehension in foundational skills, a state and nationwide challenge students faced after spotty pandemic learning left gaps in key areas.

Mendez students take a one-hour intervention class for reading and math in which students focus specifically on those skills, Willis said.

“We can’t spend an entire lesson on dividing fractions,” Willis said. “That’s not grade-level, but we still have to find lessons to give them strategies.”

The 2024-25 school year will be Third Future's third overseeing Mendez. The Austin district will reevaluate its contract with the company before the end of the upcoming school year.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Mendez Middle students see some mixed results on 2024 STAAR scores