Category: Uncategorized

By GEORGE SCOTT

This is both very personal and analytical.

What is the most brutal but factual comment I can make to you that might motivate you to take our website’s goal to help parents help their middle school children advance academically seriously?

How about this?

When the Texas Education Agency’s first accountability testing system in TAAS – a ridiculously below grade level system – was going to transition to the ACTUALLY HARDER TAKS tests in 2003, it faced a profound crisis that would undermine its institutional integrity if commonly understood and effectively reported by the news media and effectively litigated by competent civil rights attorneys. It was not.

The TEA produced tables of numbers that used the color of students’ skin (ETHNICITY) and economic status to statistically project how many multiple tens of thousands of Texas students would fail those tests if the passing standards were not reduced DRAMATICALLY  from WHAT ITS OWNstate panel had recommended.

SO REDUCE the standards BASED upon the color of students’ skin is LITERALLY what the TEA did. OFFICIAL TEA TABLES show this for every grade and subject for White, Asian, Hispanic, Black, and economically disadvantaged students. Results? Statistically profound. I have kept those tables to strengthen me when I get discouraged that my past efforts HAVE failed. At 75, this is probably my last rodeo.

In the intervening decades, the damage done to at-risk, economically disadvantaged students statistically dominated by children of color has had an unspeakably tragic consequence.

The consequences since 2003 carry forward through today when evaluating current passing and grade level standards of STAAR, Numbers prove it. Don’t doubt: that decision still impacts your children TODAY – all children.

But you MAY NOT want to deal with all those numbers. OK! But be aware that there is one number you will WANT AND NEED TO UNDERSTAND for every STAAR test your child took last year: SCALE SCORE.  That’s where serious analysis begins. All else is TEA’s bureaucratic chit-chat. A-F might as well be Z to A. We’ll get there if you stay with us.

The Good News?  My wife’s instructional lessons available here can be used to shun most of the numbers and give you real world understanding of your child’s academic strengths and weaknesses in the privacy of your home AND to advance academically NO MATTER WHAT THE COLOR OF YOUR SKIN AND WHETHER YOU ARE RICH OR POOR OR SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN.

If you will spend time with our website, you’ll understand system better for your family. Let’s get started.

BY: Anne and George Scott

From the first paragraph of our launch of Middle School Up Literacy, we want to make the following very clear.

The Texas Education Agency is primarily responsible for manipulating the public education system’s testing and accountability systems for some three decades in ways that have created monumental problems at the district and campus level statewide. To be certain: the TEA is our focal point of criticism for this and what we will present and analyze going forward about the consequences of that state agency – NOT Katy ISD at either the district administrative or campus level.

As we go forward publishing our data and analysis and programs, NOTHING should be interpreted as saying or implying that anyone but the TEA institutionally is responsible for creating the problems we will identify and address in terms of student academic performance. From financial and operational matters across the board, the TEA has too often sabotaged the ability of school districts and campus officials including classroom teachers to be able to take the kinds of actions that are needed to fully protect and serve the academic needs of the full range of children.

Particularly at the campus level, we have enormous respect for the professionalism and dedication of the Katy ISD employees. State government is responsible for so many of the more dire problems. Nothing we write subtracts from that profound belief.

*****

Now let’s go to bullet points with our ‘bottom line” prime motivations and actions that will guide this website.

• Help parents help their middle school children advance academically regardless of where their starting point is.
• Provide parents with a wide range of instructional support particularly in English, grammar, usage, mechanics AND literature and reading comprehension that they can use in the privacy of their homes to support their children’s instructional needs. We’ve started that process today by highlighting a couple of dozen links to such instructional courses from Anne’s almost three decades of classroom teaching. We have also currently made available at ELA/Math Assessments on the home page our middle school ELA diagnostic test. A math test will follow soon.
• Provide parents with official student academic performance data at Katy ISD campuses in middle and high schools to show them the scope of the challenges which confront their children now and going forward. We’ll start providing campus-specific data by student demographics about a week or so after our launch ‘settles in.’
• Help parents understand the 3-decades of Texas Education Agency’s institutional deception through 3 testing schemes including today’s STAAR about establishing performance standards that do not tell the whole truth parents about the academic strengths and weaknesses of their children.
  • To that end, today in the KISD/TEA News Update section we provide the most recent 2024-25 STAAR performance standards. Tables show the low standards for passing the various tests as well as the so-called “Grade Level” performance standards. Additionally, We provide some of our tables produced from such official documents involving STAAR back to 2018-19.
• Give parents  a brutal but very factual (much pulled from actual public record) ‘history’ lesson and analysis  (a one and done treatment) in an extended monograph that documents the path of academic deception that the TEA has pursued for over 30 years in misrepresenting academic performance standards as grade level credible. If you want to spend an hour or two of your life to genuinely understand how the Texas Public Education System has reached its current crisis, this is a must-read. It will give you the context to understand the present reality. It is in the History Texas Testing section on the home page.

We will start some media marketing next week.  We’ll leave the current content ‘steady’ for at least a week while we introduce ourselves. You may send inquiries to this email address;  contact@middleschoolupliteracy.com

Middle School Up Literacy starts today with a serious wakeup call for Katy ISD Parents. As the district has grown substantially, it acknowledges reality that student academic performance covers the full range of profound academic excellence to profound academic deficiencies.

We are asking you to review at least one table with 96 numbers describing the passing and grade level performance standards of the 16 STAAR tests in every grade and subject in the most recent 2025 main spring testing cycle and comparing it to same cycle six years ago in 2019.

These 96 numbers in Table 1 represent the accumulated academic deception of three-decades since the early 1990’s of the Texas Education Agency’s various student testing and accountability systems. Table 2 and Table 3 will add additional insight, but Table 1 is the ‘bottom line reality’ of TEA deception. STAAR STANDARD – 2025 & In Transition

It is an easy-read table. Let’s go to the bottom line you need to understand. It involves the percent of raw score correct answers your child has to achieve to pass the test or be at grade-level according to the Texas Education Agency. Subjects; Reading, Math, Social Studies, History, Science, Biology, and Algebra.

• The PASSING standards in 2025 for all those subjects tested range from 30% to 44% right answers with most in the 30% range.
• The GRADE LEVEL standards range from 47% to 62% right answers with most in just the 50% range.
• In the vast majority of the 16 tested subjects, both PASSING and GRADE LEVEL standards for 2025 have been lowered since STAAR of 2019 testing.

This means that students of today can miss more questions of even five years ago and pass the test. Grade level and master levels have been lowered also.

If you follow this website and let us try to help you help advocate for your children more effectively, you The harsh reality is that when the TEA and Katy ISD tell you your child has passed or made grade level on any STAAR tests, you really do not have the data you need to genuinely understand what that means in terms of your child’s academic skills.

Our home page has an entire section (History Tx. Testing) that will walk you through three decades of the TEA’s manipulation of academic integrity in each era of testing and accountability from the beginning of TAAS through TAKS and now STAAR. Here’s a link to that monograph:

You may have to cut and paste OR go to HISTORY TEXAS TESTING header on the home page: https://middleschoolupliteracy.com/history-texas-testing/

It’s a brutal history; we document it fully. If you spend two hours of your life in reading and studying this well-organized & summarized data of three decades, you will have a greater appreciation of the mission, products, and services of Middle School Up Literacy.

This website is dedicated to helping you in the current real world you and your children currently confront.

• You deserve to know the reality about your children’s academic skills & deficiencies.
• You deserve genuine support in confronting that reality with effective strategies and advocacy.

Middle School Up Literacy can be an effective partner with you,

George  and Anne Scott are launching Middle School Up Literacy with a passionate dedication to help parents really help their children in the Texas public education system.

Anne is now a recently retired English Language Arts classroom teacher of 28 years with incredible experience and insight into the academic needs of students in the 6^th through 9^th grades. George is a retired journalist and public policy analyst and research with a special focus in Texas public education issues.

We have three primary goals:

1. Provide you credible diagnostic assessments in English usage and math for middle school students which can include a professional review of your child’s academic records and independent assessments as helpful. The English test will be available immediately; the math test will be available soon.
2. Provide effective and cost-effective reading and English usage lessons to students at all skill levels, including successful students who want to advance even further. We also offer targeted personal assistance and advice.
3. Help you personally to genuinely understand what the TEA’s testing and accountability system denies you in order to help you more effectively understand and advocate within the system for your children about their genuine academic needs.

Here’s a sad truth. If you depend upon the Texas Education Agency’s deceptive testing and accountability system that has seriously manipulated passing and grade level academic standards in all subjects and grade levels for three decades to understand your child’s genuine needs, you have the wrong partner.

Please follow our introductory posts and videos here which will explain how we are going to try to help you as a real partner. Then we are going to do our best to do it.

We are not going to overwhelm you from the start with numbers about student performance. However, we will provide you that extensive data focusing upon Katy ISD and the State you need to make your decisions going forward. That data will soon include the posting of campus-by-campus scores from 5^th grade through end of course high school testing on the most recent STAAR testing results in every subject.

Anne’s experience in actual classrooms with thousands of children of a wide range of academic skills has inspired her to create hundreds of specific instructional lessons that promote academic recovery and genuine academic growth.

George’s decades of public policy analysis with a enduring focus on Texas public education from the start has made him one of the few Texas experts in understanding and proving how the TEA has manipulated the system to deny you the information you need to make the best educational decisions for your children.

Together, their goal is to use Middle School Up Literacy to help you help your children.

After almost three decades of being a junior and senior high school English teacher in Texas public schools – 23 of those in Katy ISD – I have now retired. However, I have not retired from my commitment to help parents help their children develop a full range of academic skills that will serve their future efforts in higher education or the work force.

That’s what Middle School Literacy Up gives me a chance to do – help you and your children.

So many children reached my junior high school or 9^th grade classrooms with seriously deficient skills in one or more areas that dramatically affected their ability to master reading comprehension. So many others come to junior high without a basic grasp of grammar, usage, and punctuation.

Sadly, the public education system has de-emphasized effective, rigorous instructional strategies at the elementary level. Tragically, so many students fall behind by the time they reach middle school. A failure to close these skill gaps at a credible grade-level standard in the middle school, means so many students never catch up.

Often, even students with otherwise strong academic skills still pay the price by not genuinely mastering the full range of ELA skills in middle school. How? It is when they take their college entrance exams or hit those higher education freshman courses where a lot of reading and writing is demanded and grades start really counting.

It is common knowledge among classroom teachers that the STAAR tests in ELA and math grossly distort the academic credibility of standards that assert PASSING the tests or achieving ACTUAL GRADE LEVEL performance. For instance, when the passing standard of 2025 8^th grade STAAR English Test is 36% content mastery and grade level is 57% content mastery, the system has gone terribly wrong, and your child is both the target and the victim. Even if your child crosses the Grade Level threshold, what does it really mean?

The brutal reality is that so many classroom teachers are assigned classes of students with a wide range of actual academic skills. I can tell you after almost 30 years in these situations, low performing students don’t get all the instruction they need and neither do the higher performing students with skill gaps.

Classroom teachers don’t get magic wands. Neither do parents.

Our Middle School Literacy Up mission is to find a way to help you help your child:

1. By helping you with direct advocacy efforts and consulting as requested.
2. By making my instructional lessons of my career available to you targeting the full range of students who are below grade level OR ones with serious but targeted skills gaps OR advanced students have the ability to take their performance up a notch.

Our website will give you all the details. Our focus to begin involves the parents who send their children to elementary or middle schools, with 9^th grade students still in our focus of service.

I have retired. But I haven’t quit.

Over her career as an English Language Arts classroom teacher for children of the full range of academic skills from 6^th through 9^th grades, Anne has developed instructional lessons that may be old-fashioned but remain highly effective in helping her students make academic progress.

Over the last decade, she has successfully marketed well over 200 of these specific lessons on a national teacher-based website. That means that classroom teachers who confront their own challenges in their classrooms have used her lessons to help their students.

This full range of products is now available to help you meet the needs of your children. That may mean helping them achieve genuine grade level, or it may mean taking their strong skills to the next academic level.

Starting today, Middle School Up Literacy will start making the same lessons that thousands of classroom teachers have used to help you with your children. We start by letting you review almost 25 specific lessons/bundles that have been popularly marketed to professional classroom teachers. Because of the bundles, there are more than 25 individual lessons you can review.

On the home page, the full array of lessons can be viewed and accessed under the headers of Grammar, Reading, and Jake Maddox Short Novels.

• For instance, the Maddox novels are for middle school students who have profound deficiencies in reading skills – comprehension and vocabulary. Anne has used them to help struggling students use the high interest stories of young people succeeding in sports to help her students become better readers. They enjoy the stories. They progress by reading. Books are available free from school and public libraries. If your child is a struggling reader, these novels may not be ‘flashy’ but they are very effective in help your child advance in reading comprehension.
• The grammar/usage/mechanics lessons walk students through the basic rules of English usage and grammar through the more complex, higher order skills. Grammar lessons – old fashioned? Yes. Realize this. When students reach high school, dealing with these deficiencies is not really a part of the curriculum. Going forward, that hurts even ‘good’ students on testing for higher education and in university or college classrooms where remediation is not on the instructional agenda.
• Those who aspire to a professional career need the ability to write clear and correct sentences and paragraphs.
• The reading lessons focus upon reading comprehension skills. Many reading lessons are also based upon a novel or short story that is commonly taught in junior high. Becoming a better reader requires students to READ MORE. In these lessons, struggling readers and advanced readers will find their perfect book, story, or passage. If a book or short story is not protected by copyright, it is included in its entirety. Otherwise, it will be a common title that is freely available in school or public libraries.
• There’s no magic wand a teacher or parent can wave to correct deficiencies in basic skills or reading comprehension. Within Anne’s lessons that are now available on Middle School Up Literacy, parents have access to tried-and-true instructional lessons used by a career teacher for decades – successfully.