Bill to scrap STAAR test dies in the Texas Legislature

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A legislative effort to scrap the STAAR test to respond to concerns that the test puts unnecessary pressure on students died in the last days of the legislative session.

House Bill 4, authored by state Rep. Brad Buckley, would have swapped the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness test for three shorter tests given throughout the school year.

The Senate and House failed to come out of closed-door negotiations with a compromise in time, missing a key legislative deadline this weekend.

Legislators in the House and Senate agreed that Texas schools needed to do away with the STAAR test. But in the end, the two chambers could not close the gulf over what they wanted to see out of the new test and from the A-F ratings system, which uses standardized test results to grade schools’ performance.

Tensions had come to a head in recent years when a dispute over how ratings should be calculated led to two years of scores to be held up in court.

The Senate wanted to solidify the Texas Education Agency commissioner’s authority to set stricter standards for the ratings system. And to discourage schools from taking legal action again, the upper chamber’s version of the bill gave the TEA commissioner authority to appoint a conservator to districts that initiate lawsuits.

The House version, meanwhile, required the TEA to get approval from the Legislature before making major changes to the ratings system. And it left an avenue for districts to sue to challenge the TEA in the future, while setting up a fast-track court process so those lawsuits would not halt the release of the ratings.

The two chambers also differed over whether to keep or do away with a mandatory social studies test, with the House in favor of less testing.

The session started with nearly identical versions of the legislation in the House and Senate, but when senators slammed school districts in committee hearings and on the chamber floor for participating in the recent lawsuits, few superintendents came out to testify in front of the Senate Education Committee. Instead, the school leaders were in talks with House representatives about their lack of trust in the state’s accountability and testing systems.

The House’s rewrite of the legislation to reflect school leaders’ concerns eventually came late in the session, leaving little time for negotiations between the chambers to reach a compromise.

To the Texas State Teachers Association, the current high-stakes STAAR test takes instructional time away from the classroom and is not an accurate measure of student success. But the group was holding their breath when the two chambers were in closed-door negotiations.

“We think we are better off that there is no bill at all than what the Senate wanted to do,” said Clay Robison, a spokesperson for the group. “We thought the Senate gave far too much authority to the unelected state commissioner.”

The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

Disclosure: Texas State Teachers Association has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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