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Texas lawmakers have sent legislation replacing STAAR, the state’s widely unpopular state standardized test, to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.
Once Abbott signs House Bill 8, Texas will swap the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness for three shorter tests at the beginning, middle and end of each school year. Students will begin to take the new tests in the 2027-28 school year.
“House Bill 8 ends the high stakes and high stress nature of one test, one day,” Rep. Brad Buckley, the bill’s author, said Wednesday evening before the Texas House voted to send the proposal to Abbott. “This is unprecedented oversight of the assessment and accountability system by this body.”
Legislators replaced STAAR amid frustration from families and teachers, who say the test puts too much pressure on students and that preparing for it takes up too much time in the classroom.
The bill’s passage comes after two earlier attempts failed to scrap STAAR. Legislation to that effect died during the final hours of this year’s regular lawmaking session because the House and the Senate could not agree on what they wanted out of the new test. Chamber leaders reconciled many of their differences earlier this summer, but Democrats blocked the House from advancing any bills when they fled the state in an attempt to stop a rare mid-decade redistricting effort. Democrats returned to the state in August, allowing the House to continue working on legislation.
School accountability experts celebrated the new standardized testing system, which is used to assess whether students have the core academic skills they need to be ready for life after high school. Testing throughout the year, experts said, will give families a better window into how their children are doing and help teachers tailor their instruction to meet students’ needs.
But some House members were displeased with the concessions the lower chamber made to the Senate to reach an agreement. They questioned whether HB 8 does enough to reduce the pressure on students and the amount of time spent on testing.
“This bill was supposed to be the bill that was the win for our public schools and for our kids,” Rep. Gina Hinojosa, D-Austin, said on the House floor Wednesday. “This is no win. This is a terrible bill … I can’t even believe it’s made it this far.”
Here’s what you need to know about the changes coming to the state’s standardized test.
Students to take three, shorter standardized tests
The three shorter tests will replace the end-of-the-year STAAR in an effort to reduce the pressure that a single test puts on students and monitor more closely their academic growth.
Schools that already require students to take nationally recognized assessments will be able to count those as the beginning- and middle-of-the-year tests. It is unclear yet which exams will be acceptable to meet that requirement.
The Texas Education Agency will have a hand in creating the end-of-the-year test. Many House Democrats opposed HB 8 saying the TEA should have less of a role in shaping the test at a time when STAAR’s shortcomings have pushed school districts and families to distrust the agency. Buckley has defended TEA’s role by pointing to a committee of 40 classroom teachers that will act as a counterbalance, reviewing the tests’ questions and weighing in on their rigor.
Families can expect to get test scores in about two days, a much speedier turnaround compared to the current wait, which can take up to several weeks. Results for all three tests will now be presented as percentile ranks, which show how students are performing compared to their classmates. The end-of-year test results would also show the state’s assessment of whether students have approached, met or mastered grade-level skills, like the current STAAR test does.
Proponents of testing students throughout the year hope it will give teachers useful information about where students are struggling, so they can tweak instruction to meet those learning gaps.
Educators can no longer run students through practice tests
Teachers won’t be able to give their students practice exams ahead of the state standardized tests.
TEA Commissioner Mike Morath has told lawmakers that practice exams can take up weeks of instruction time and aren’t proven to help students do better on the test.
The ban on practice tests could buy back 15 to 30 hours of lost instructional time per student each school year, according to estimates from David Osman, an auditor of standardized testing.
Graduation requirement to pass English II ends
High schoolers will no longer need to pass the English II assessment, which is currently a graduation requirement. It’s the first time Texas has eased graduation testing requirements since 2015, Buckley said.
Students will still need to pass an end-of-the-year test on English I to get their high school diploma, along with exams in algebra and biology.
The House pushed to make exams optional for some subjects in HB 8 to decrease testing. Before the lower chamber voted on the bill, Hinojosa added a provision to get rid of the English II test.
Hinojosa also tried to get rid of social studies portions of the exam. But when HB 8 got to the Senate floor last week, Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, added them back in, saying students should test in that subject to ensure they have foundational knowledge for civic engagement. As a result, eighth graders will continue to test on social studies and high schoolers on U.S. history.
Scores on three tests will count toward schools’ A-F ratings
Texas uses standardized test results to grade schools on how well they are educating their students through what is known as the state’s A-F accountability system. With testing set to change, legislators instructed TEA to develop a metric for student progress based on growth over the three new tests, with the intent of factoring that metric into each school’s rating.
Such a metric hasn’t been introduced into any state’s school accountability system, according to analysis from EdTrust. It is unclear how the TEA will create a consistent way to track student growth given that schools will be allowed to take different tests for the beginning and middle of the year.
HB 8 also waded into how much power TEA should have in changing the benchmarks for schools to get a good grade, a key point of tension in a recent legal battle between school districts and the education agency. The bill codifies that the TEA has the power to refresh those goal posts every five years. It also requires TEA to announce any changes to the accountability system by July 15 of each year, about a month before the school year starts.
The stakes for how the state measures schools’ performance are high: Failing grades can bring on state sanctions, like forcing a struggling school to close or ousting a district’s democratically elected school board.
In response to calls to evaluate student success beyond testing, the legislation also instructs the TEA to track student participation in pre-K, extracurriculars and workforce training in middle schools. But none of those metrics will be factored into schools’ ratings.
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