This Wednesday, Gov. Greg Abbott signed House Bill 8 into law, which will replace STAAR with three shorter assessments in the beginning, middle, and end of the school year — starting 2027-28.
The new testing system is meant to reduce the stress of a single, high-stakes exam and give quicker access to information about how students are doing.
The Texas Education Agency, which currently designs and oversees the STAAR exam, will design and administer the new end-of-year test. Schools will be able to give other nationally recognized assessments and count them as beginning and midyear tests, but it’s unclear what specific tests will qualify.
Families will be able to access scores in around two days, much quicker than the usual several-week waiting period of STAAR. Scores of all three tests will be represented in percentile ranks.
Growth based on the scores from the three tests will also count toward TEA accountability ratings. However, implementation is unclear, especially since schools may use different tests for the beginning and middle of the year.
Some educators, like RHS Algebra I and IB math teacher Carlos Rodriguez, disagree with this new student progress-based approach. “I feel that the fact that we’ve strayed away from A, B, C, D, or F into growth is indicative of the fact that our performance is very low. Because now you aren’t looking at achievement, you’re looking at progress. And progression is — and probably can be — shown easier than performance,” he said.
The bill will also prohibit teachers from administering practice tests, like the current mock STAAR, with the intention of saving instructional time.
Despite the ban on practice tests, Rodriguez cautioned that the new system may unintentionally take more time through added reviews. “With more tests comes more pressure. Administrators don’t want scores that look bad, so teachers may feel pushed to spend even more time on reviews instead of instruction,” he said.
The bill also gives the TEA the power to change accountability rating criteria every five years and requires the agency to communicate any changes by July 15, before each school year.
In addition, high school students will no longer be required to pass the English II exam to graduate. Currently, students need to pass five end-of-year assessments to earn their diploma, including Algebra I, Biology, English I, and U.S. History.
With the bill’s signing, Rodriguez made it clear that neither the current nor the new testing system satisfies him, instead advocating for decentralization.
“I feel that educators should have the autonomy to create assessments. Maybe even at a school level, because although you may have similar demographics, you might have similar statistics between different school districts, the culture of the school in and of itself may influence the aptitude of some of [the testing system],” he said.
“I shouldn’t be micromanaged or pigeonholed into a certain way of teaching, or a certain way of divulging information. I think that stunts not only the growth of the teacher but also the growth of the students because they’re not able to get a different expansion of their acquired knowledge,” he later stated.
