HIGH SCHOOL RUBRICS

Why These Rubrics Exist

Secondary writing instruction in Texas sits at an uncomfortable intersection. Teachers are expected to prepare students for STAAR, but STAAR is the floor — not the ceiling. Students who can pass an EOC writing task are not automatically prepared for the TSIA2 WritePlacer, a college admission essay, a dual credit course, or the writing demands of a career. The gap between those two expectations is where students fall.

The rubrics on this page were built to close that gap.

What's wrong with what we have.

The STAAR EOC writing rubrics are text-dependent by design. They are built for a specific testing context — a student reading a passage and responding to it under time constraints. That's a legitimate assessment task, but it's not the only writing students need to do, and rubrics anchored to text evidence don't travel well into independent, extended writing where students must bring texts and lived experience to the task. The rubrics on my platform are designed to serve as a bridge — a deliberate crosswalk from STAAR performance toward the full demands of College, Career, and Military Readiness (CCMR).

The TSIA2 WritePlacer rubric assesses argumentative writing holistically across six dimensions and is a useful college-readiness tool. But a closer look reveals a structural gap: while the highest-scoring sample essays demonstrate clear argumentative moves — a defensible claim, engagement with opposing perspectives, concession, and rebuttal — neither the holistic descriptors nor the six dimension definitions name those elements as evaluative criteria. The rubric's "Development and Support" dimension lists point of view, coherent arguments, evidence, and elaboration — but stops short of identifying the structural components that make an argument genuinely argumentative. The exemplars show students what strong argumentative writing looks like, but the rubric doesn't give teachers or peers the language to guide students toward it. Feedback is only as precise as the tool behind it. When the rubric is silent on the elements that matter most, instruction follows suit. 

What these rubrics do differently.

These three rubrics — one for argumentative writing, one for informational/explanatory writing, and one for analytical writing — were built from the ground up as classroom-facing tools. They are:

Holistic, not trait-by-trait. A teacher reads the whole essay, identifies the score point that best describes the overall performance, and confirms against four dimensions. This mirrors how both STAAR and TSIA2 scoring actually works in practice, and it builds the kind of internalized judgment teachers need to give students meaningful feedback.

Mode-specific. Argumentative writing has different structural and intellectual demands than informational writing, which has different demands than analytical writing. A single rubric that tries to cover all three flattens the distinctions that matter. These rubrics are separated by mode so that the criteria match what students are actually being asked to do.

Vertically scalable. The criteria don't change from English I to English IV. What changes is the cognitive demand of the task and the text complexity. A Score Point 4 in English I reflects grade-appropriate mastery. A Score Point 4 in English IV reflects the evaluative, rhetorical, and analytical demands encoded in TEKS E4. The rubric describes quality; the assignment calibrates the grade-level expectation. Teachers can use the same rubric from 9th grade through 12th grade and track genuine growth over time.

Argumentatively complete. The argumentative rubric explicitly names claim, evidence, commentary, counterargument, concession, and rebuttal as evaluative criteria — because those are what Texas TEKS E1–E4 require and what college writing actually demands. Students who cannot acknowledge and engage opposing perspectives are not finished writers, regardless of how well they assert their own position.

Non-text-dependent. These rubrics are designed for independent writing tasks — the kind students will encounter on the TSIA2, in dual credit courses, in Advanced Placement, and in postsecondary writing. They are appropriate for on-demand tasks, extended projects, and drafting-and-revision processes alike.

Who these rubrics are for.

These rubrics were designed for secondary ELAR teachers in Grades 9–12 who are building students toward genuine college and career readiness — not just test performance. They are free to use, adapt, and share. If you use them, the only thing I ask is that you hold students to what the Score Point 4 actually requires. Don't negotiate it down. The rigor is the point.