When the final bend of the academic school year comes around, there can be a lot of emotions building up for students and teachers alike: excitement for summer, sadness at saying goodbye – but before all that, dread over the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness.
Eliminating the STAAR – a source of frustration for many educators, students and parents – has long been a political hot button that this year made its way into the Legislature as HB 4, authored by Republican Rep. Brad Buckley.
Brant Bingamon, who wrote about this for the Austin Chronicle, spoke with the Texas Standard about state’s history of standardized testing, what the tipping point was for folks to call for the end of the STAAR, and what could happen with the little time the Legislature has left to make a decision.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Where is HB 4 right now in these waning hours of the Legislature?
Brant Bingamon: Far as I can tell, it looks like it’s about to be replaced by a different bill that the senate is pushing called SB 1962, which basically would gut almost everything that’s been proposed in HB 4.
Has the House passed this legislation?
The House passed HB4, which is the bill that would get rid of STAAR, and the Senate has not yet voted on the House’s bill, HB 4, but they did already pass their own bill back in April, which is SB 1962.
Which would essentially keep it in place, is that right?
It replaces the STAAR, but it keeps [Texas Education Agency] in control of the test. So whatever it’s replaced with will be just like the previous tests, you know, they rename them periodically. So it would be just one of those types of exercises.
» MORE: It’s the last week of the legislative session. Here’s what to expect.
Statewide standardized testing has been going on for decades, and it’s taken on many form – some people remember TABS, TAAS, TAKS.
The biggest concern I remember hearing from educators was having to teach to the test. But I guess in the last decade really the stakes became much higher as school rating systems became sort of do-or-die moments for schools that didn’t do well, right?
Yeah, things have gotten really more intense because in 2015, the federal No Child Left Behind law was replaced, and that was a law that sort of incorporated all of these types of end-of-year tests.
And so much of the rest of the country moved away from these types of high-stakes tests at that point, but Texas didn’t. It wrote the same standards from No Child Left Behind into its law, essentially. And ever since then, especially in the last five years, it has kind of raised the stakes.
What about the tipping point? What is it that has lawmakers now considering the possibility of doing away with it altogether?
Well, it’s because of the A-F system in part, and that was a change that was implemented in 2019.
This gives each school a grade, right?
Yes, it gives students, schools and entire school districts grades. And the grades for 2023 were just released, which showed that the scores of school districts and schools across the state collapsed.
And so that has galvanized anger about the arbitrary nature of the STAAR, because it’s a test that TEA controls and writes the questions for. And those question are changed periodically, and the changes in the test for 2022 are widely regarded as the reason that so many schools suddenly are scoring Fs.
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If you get rid of the STAAR test though, won’t there be something to replace it? How do you go about evaluating schools, and is it not possible that you could wind up with something even more complicated?
Yes, you’ll still be evaluating schools, but it will be with a different test, a different assessment, and that is some sort of norm reference test, like a test called MAP Growth, which is already used in schools across the country, and it’s already used in Texas.
It’s a shorter test. It’s a test that’s more useful for educators, and it’s less high-stakes.
How likely is it that we’ll see the STAAR test replaced before sine die?
Seems really unlikely at this point, because even though the representatives in the House voted 143-1 to eliminate STAAR, there seems to be no movement on that bill in the Senate.
