Texas public schools · STAAR + EOC · 2026
Eight statewide score distributions. One ring for every possible essay score.
Each score is a full ring. Ring area shows the share of students.
Texas ECR · 2026
Back to the dataAbout this visual
This is a statewide picture of how Texas students scored on the essay portion of the 2026 STAAR reading language arts tests. Grades 3–8 include statewide results; English I and English II include first-time testers only so the EOC results are more comparable.
01
Score 0 is the outside ring. Score 10 is the center. The area of each colored ring equals the percentage of essays that earned that score. A larger ring means more students.
02
These results isolate the Extended Constructed Response, or ECR. Texas scoring guides explain that two scorer ratings are added together, producing a final score from 0 to 10.
A pattern worth investigating
Nearly half of grade 3 essays and just over half of grade 4 essays received a 0. In grade 5, that share falls to about one in four.
The size of this break is enough to raise a reasonable question: the writing task, scoring demands, or both may be too difficult for many younger writers. The published rubrics require students to organize and develop ideas, use relevant text evidence, and communicate clearly while also applying grade-level conventions.
This is a signal, not proof. The grades used different passages and prompts, and a score distribution cannot tell us whether the pattern came from task design, instruction, keyboarding, motivation, language factors, scoring, or a combination of them.
Source & scope
The 2026 statewide ECR rating summaries were retrieved from the Texas Assessment Research Portal. Percentages shown here are calculated from the reported student counts. English I and English II are limited to first-time testers; the other six panels report the statewide grade-level files.
For scoring details and response examples, see the Texas Education Agency’s 2026 grade 3 and grade 4 constructed-response scoring guides.
The applied AI workflow behind visuals like this is explored in Moving Beyond Prompting.