By Elizabeth Sander, Staff Writer
To read the article in the Houston Chronicle, click here!
A new partnership in Alief ISD aims to help high schoolers earn higher SAT scores by giving them the same access to test prep as their more affluent peers, opening doors for more college scholarships and giving the 38,000- student district a chance to earn up to $10 million in college, career and military readiness bonus funding from the state.
The district is using a $750,000 Powell Foundation grant to offset the cost of its partnership with CollegeSpring, a college prep organization that helps low- income students access college admissions and scholarships by getting better SAT scores.
CollegeSpring serves schools in 13 states, including some in the Houston and Dallas ISDs. In Alief, all ninth through 12th graders are receiving targeted test prep on Wednesdays in their regular classrooms throughout the school year.
“Our mission is really to help more underserved students open up opportunities, specifically when it comes to having the opportunity to go to college. Most of our work is around college test prep, because that’s one of the keys to getting students into competitive colleges,” said TaQuana Williams, managing director of program impact at the organization.
Some students said the lessons drastically improved their SAT experiences in March, compared to the PSAT the year prior.
Isaac Etuk, a 16-year-old junior at Hastings High School, credited his math teacher, Radhiya Wiley, for reducing his testing anxiety and seamlessly incorporating SAT math problems into class assignments.
Etuk wants to go into information systems and AI development, and he said he studied for his SAT in and out of class in hopes of clinching scholarships. The program taught him how to spot new concepts on his tests for class and how an SAT problem might look different. He also said the program showed students how they got a question wrong in practice.
“The explanation really helped out. I got a visual representation of how I got it wrong, and then, it showed me how to do it,” Etuk said. “From there, I learned from my mistakes, so I won’t make the same mistake twice.”
Alief ISD has among the highest percentage of low-income students in the Houston area, and historically its academic achievement levels have reflected some of the hardships students face. Last year, Alief ISD ranked 29th out of 45 area districts for performance on the SATs, based on Texas Education Agency data. Scores declined about 2% in the district from the previous year, and the average SAT composite score was 918 compared to the national average of 1050 and the Houston average of 972.
Teriana Jones, a 17-year-old Hastings student who wants to study engineering, said the program helped her get comfortable with different test question formats and reduced her testing anxiety.
“I was still a little nervous, but I was more confident. I was way more confident taking the SAT or taking the TSI,” she said.
Open to all high school students
Wiley said she saw the program’s mission reflected in the materials she connected students with in her math class.
“They not only gave us practice problems to work with, they also were able to give the kids a guide to say ‘This is why you want to do well on this test, because this is what the test gets you into. These are the opportunities that you have available,’” Wiley said. “A lot of kids don’t know what they have available to them and what their opportunities (are).”
Alief ISD has also faced funding shortfalls recently, and while it is not alone in the problem, leaders are trying to find any avenue through which to solve it. One thing they are hoping with this partnership is to access more college, career and military readiness bonus funding if students do better on the Texas Success Initiative Assessment (TSIA), which is a state test designed to help colleges determine whether students are ready for entry-level college coursework in English and math.
If districts have higher percentages of students who pass these benchmarks, they also get college and career ready outcomes bonuses at up to $5,000 per student if that student is economically disadvantaged. If more than 2,000 of Alief ISD’s 12,000 students reach these benchmarks, the district could see up to $10 million in bonus funding, which Everett Hare Sr., executive director of curriculum & instruction, said would be used to advance district programs.
How it works
A key part of the program, according to CollegeSpring officials, is to have the teaching take place in students’ classrooms with educators they already know and trust, rather than hours of outside tutoring. It’s also an approach that saves money and time for districts and families that do not have the option to provide test prep on a large scale.
Implementing a new education program in a classroom and asking teachers to learn how to use it can pose barriers, as some might not have the time in their current curriculum or the want to try what could seem like prescriptive lessons, but Wiley said that she was able to work with her CollegeSpring consultant to create lessons that wove into her tried-and-true curricula, as a 21-year math teacher in the district.
“What I actually loved was the fact that they consulted us,” Wiley said. “Once I would give the lesson, then we could go ahead and go to CollegeSpring, and they would get questions that pertain to that particular lesson, but it would be asked maybe in SAT style or TSIA form. And I really love that.” Hastings High School math teacher Radhiya Wiley gives instructions as her students use CollegeSpring software to complete practice test exercises in algebra as they prepare for the mandated Texas Success Initiative Assessment in English teacher Nijah Lastrapes’ said her experience was similar.
“It helps us understand, ‘OK, what is exactly going to be on this exam? What do we need to hit? What are they going to need to know?’” said Lastrapes. “It just truly gives us a peace of mind as the instructor, and it’s fun for me to take the modules and make them fun for my students.”
One example of this was on a Wednesday in mid-March when the English teacher tied in an art project with a CollegeSpring lesson on important elements to an essay.
Each group was instructed to take a keyword such as support, thesis, relevance and other components of a successful essay and define them on a poster along with writing three examples of the word. Students then shared their answers aloud and discussed it with Lastrapes. Then, they worked on using the words to answer questions about texts on the online platform, in the style of questions that might be found on the test.
“Unfortunately, I don’t know if students go the extra mile to take the opportunities that are given. So I feel like with this, this is a huge benefit for them, and it’s going to impact them pretty well,” Lastrapes said. “I feel like it’s going to be a huge growth.”
It’s too soon to see how the first year of implementing this program affected students’ test scores on the March SAT, however, during a pilot of the program at three Alief high schools last year, officials say the TSIA2 test scores showed improvement. This year, that trend continues, Hare said, as recently 75 students at Elsik high school took the exam and 75% or about 53 students succeeded on the math portion. That could contribute to as much as $160,000 to $265,000 in bonus funds for the district.
The district’s survey of students showed more confidence, too. Three out of four participating students reported that they felt more prepared and confident after receiving the test prep and taking practice tests. As students Jones and Etuk reported, sometimes confidence is half the battle.
