Beto O’Rourke wants to cancel STAAR exam. Experts say Texas at ‘inflection point’ on issue

Teachers, parents and lawmakers in the state of Texas have increasing concerns about high-stakes standardized testing, which will take on a new form this year after evolving significantly since first being introduced in 1979.

The new test will include more writing embedded throughout the exam — and the whole thing will be administered online.

District leaders worry that those changes could complicate how schools are rated in statewide accountability grades next year, adding to other gripes with the test, which teachers and school leaders say takes too much time away from other important aspects of a quality education.

While parents — including those advocating for the right to “opt out” of the standardized testing — distrust the test, a poll by the nonpartisan initiative Texas 2036 found that the majority of Texans do want to know how the schools in their communities are performing relative to others in the state using an apples-to-apples comparison on an annual test in math and reading.

Another poll, from the Charles Butt Foundation released earlier this year, found that 80% of parents looked to their child’s report card over the statewide assessments for accurate information.

The discontent from parents, and chatter about the future of the test in school districts and by a candidate for Texas governor signal possible changes in the future, experts say.

“I would really hope that we’re at an inflection point where we recognize the teachers and especially … school counselors could much better spend their time focusing on instruction and mental health needs,” Texas Christian University educational leadership professor Jo Beth Jimerson said.

What future reforms could look like depends on who you ask.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke has repeatedly said on the campaign trail that he is going to “cancel the STAAR exam.”

“I propose replacing that with something more like a diagnostic, where we quickly understand where kids are without preparing for that test,” he said. “And use it not punitively, but as an opportunity to get resources and attention to classrooms and kids who need it.”

Can the governor cancel the STAAR exam?

But could he do that?

Gabriel Huddleston, the director of the Center for Public Education and Community Engagement at TCU, said O’Rourke is tapping into a sense of frustration from teachers and parents alike. But it is not as simple as canceling the exam.

“He can’t do that,” Huddleston said. “You can’t just say we’re going to stop doing it. Because there’s federal guidelines that basically insist that states have to have some form of accountability measure.”

While the test can be paused in extreme circumstances, like during COVID-19 and Hurricane Harvey in 2017, federal accountability requirements don’t allow states to suspend the assessments.

What the governor can do is direct the legislature and work to modify the testing, Huddleston said, adding that the test has gone through many iterations over the past decades.

Test has changed over the years

With each change the tests have gotten harder and more rigorous with many legislative requirements raising the stakes of the exams from simply measuring basic skills, to deciding whether students are able to graduate and deciding how schools rank on an A-F system.

This evolution has drawn criticism in the past.

Former Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott said during a speech in 2012 that the state test had become a “perversion of its original intent,” adding that he looked forward to “reeling it back.” He left the role the same year.

Jimerson, the associate professor of educational leadership at TCU, said the original intent was simple.

“The original intent was to give us some statewide data on school-level performance,” Jimerson said. “And also, to be fair, to be sure that we weren’t hiding kids away and not serving them equitably.”

That included students with disabilities and emergent bilingual students, she said.

“We wanted to be sure that we weren’t just providing good education for the people who could advocate for themselves with the most voice and the most power,” she said.

Following that, the tests took on a new role.

The first official statewide assessment was given in 1986, with the first accountability system mandated in 1993. The legislature raised the stakes of the tests again in 1999 by requiring satisfactory grades to move on from third, fifth and eighth grade. That requirement was removed with another piece of legislation passed last year.

Along the way, additional measurements were added and the tests continued to get harder, Jimerson said.

The most recent accountability system was prescribed in 2017, with schools and campuses facing measurements on three domains: student achievement, school progress and closing the gaps.

Fort Worth leader: Too much focus on the test

When asked about the high-stakes testing, Fort Worth ISD Superintendent Angélica Ramsey said she is worried about the outsized role of the test in Texas education.

“Abolish the STAAR? I don’t know, but I would love the state to be able to use those millions and millions and millions of dollars that they spend on STAAR and fund us on enrollment instead of (average daily attendance),” she said. “I think we have an overreliance on how children do one day of the year.”

Ramsey said that she sees the value in all schools taking one test, adding that prior to No Child Left Behind, a 2000s-era piece of federal legislation, there was too little being done to track the progress of children in schools. The right answer would be a balance, she said.

With changes coming to the test, however, Ramsey is worried that comparisons will be hard to make — putting accountability scores and measurements of progress into question. The new superintendent joined the district just as it announced a hard-fought B accountability rating, after years of lower scores.

“I was in another state when the state went to embedded writing and the change in test, and I will say that the state chose because they could not make determinations from one school year to the next, because it was a new test, that we were frozen,” she said.

When the state moved to a new test in 2012, it paused accountability scores for this reason. Any changes to a test with stakes as high as they are under the current law also could put stress on teachers.

“Can you imagine being a classroom teacher in a tested subject and maybe in early spring you are going to find out what the rules are?” Ramsey said. “But then the kids are testing in four to six weeks — it just doesn’t seem fair.”