W live in Texas and I have a low opinion of the STAAR test in general.
STAAR is not necessarily accurate as a measure of how your individual child is doing in school and I'm not sure it's even intended to be so. It is high-stakes testing designed to evaluate teachers, schools and districts more than individual students. It's poorly done. The 5th grade version had a graphic that included the F-bomb this year.
Bottom line, I'd take almost any other instrument more seriously than STAAR. The TEA posts graphs of the distribution curve for various tests on their website in the assessment section. The curve does not always or even frequently correlate to an actual bell curve, which leads me to wonder if the state doesn't manipulate the data as needed.
The Star360 tests for Reading and Math are put out by Renaissance, are adaptive, and therefore may be more useful if you want to know how your student is doing.
