SPOTLIGHT | Empowering Parents & Families to Partner in Their Child’s Academic Success: Log in & Learn More in Texas

Oct 1

Client: Texas Education Agency (TEA) and ETS | Project: Log In and Learn More | Partnership Length: 2017-2021 | HCM Service Area Spotlight: Research, Messaging, and Strategy | Portfolio Category: K-12

HCM Strategists, in partnership with Learning Heroes and as a part of ongoing work with ETS, helped develop a robust family engagement public awareness campaign and a set of aligned resources for the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to help parents access and use state test score results in support of their child’s grade-level progress.

OVERVIEW

In order to empower parents as partners in their children’s education, and to provide resources to navigate state-level testing data, The Texas Education Agency (TEA) developed a set of valuable parent resources to support student learning in one centralized hub at www.texasassessment.gov. Launching the “Log in and Learn More” campaign, TEA encouraged parents to visit the site to obtain information regarding students’ individual results and utilize developmental tools to support parents in continued learning at home. The website and resources were made available in English and Spanish, providing greater access and usability for Spanish-speaking parents across the state.

“Parents are a child’s first teacher. The information available at texasassessment.com gives parents valuable information and resources that can help foster a love of learning in their child,” said Commissioner of Education Mike Morath.

Information provided at www.texasassessment.gov includes the student-specific test taken for this current assessment, question-by-question performance data, a step-by-step guide to understanding STAAR scores, sample STAAR test questions, tutorials, and practice tests.

OUR WORK + IMPACT

We partnered with Educational Testing Services (ETS) and TEA to develop the initial “Log In, Learn More” campaign, along with providing consulting services on texasassessment.gov. We partnered with diverse organizations across the state as distribution channels and messengers for our work, including Texas Alliance for Boys and Girls Clubs, Texas PTA, National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, and Urban League. We also enlisted the full support of Univision in reaching Spanish speaking parents. The campaign was incredibly successful, reaching more than 1.2 million parents who accessed the site to log into the portal. We continued the campaign in 2021 and saw a 100% increase in unique logins. We have since partnered with TEA in the customization of a Parent-Teacher Planning Tool and a suite of materials to support the implementation of HB 4545, which requires accelerated instruction practices during the 2021-2022 school year for all Texas students, based on results from the Spring 2021 STAAR state test.