SENATE APPROVES REPLACING STAAR EXAMS

(AUSTIN) — The current assessment testing system used by Texas public schools will be replaced by a series of three shorter exams under a bill approved by the Senate Wednesday night. This provision was part of a larger school accountability bill, HB 8, by House Public Education Chair Representative Brad Buckley and sponsored in the Senate by Houston Senator Paul Bettencourt. He told members that the new testing paradigm has a chance to make a real difference in student success. “We’re replacing it with a transformative set of three tests, and that will transform Texas education for decades to come,” said Bettencourt.

The current STAAR tests are administered to students grade 3 through 12. Intended to assess student achievement, the tests have been the subject of criticism due to the amount of instructional time they take up and the way they force teachers to “teach to the test”. Because the tests also account for a large portion of a school’s official rating, it places high levels of stress on students and teachers to perform well.

The new system, which will be designed by the Texas Education Agency, is intended for use in all districts in the 2027-2028 school year, after a smaller pilot “beta” rollout the year before. Tests will be administered to students three times: at the beginning of the year, in the middle of the year, and finally at the end. The first two tests are true assessments and are intended to see where students are academically as they open the school year and how they are progressing through the year. Results must be available to students, parents, and teachers within 48 hours of administration. “They’ll know where they stand, and they’ll know where they stand immediately,” said Bettencourt. This allows educators to identify which students need help and in what subjects. Tests will be shorter and benchmark or practice exams will be limited. Current STAAR testing, said Bettencourt, derails the entire instructional process as teachers become singularly focused on preparing students for the exams. “It freezes education the week before the test,” he said. “There’s no instruction.” Only the third test will count towards school accountability scores.

That scoring system, which has been the subject of court battles since first implemented in 2017, is fully established in HB 8, requiring that all districts as well as individual campuses are rated on an A-F scale. The rating scale was created under the direction of then Education Chair and Houston Senator Dan Patrick and was intended to allow parents to easily understand how well their child’s school was performing relative to others. Now in his 10th year as lieutenant governor, Patrick told members that the idea came from a conversation he had with then Florida governor Jeb Bush. “He said, ‘Chairman Patrick, the most important thing we did…we said schools should be rated just like students, A through F, and it transformed education in Florida because every parent knew how their schools were performing,’” said Patrick. “It’s finally here in full blossom.”

Also passed Wednesday was a bill to allow the anti-parasitic medication ivermectin to be sold over-the-counter. The drug was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015 for its effectiveness in treating a variety of harmful parasitic infections in humans, such as river blindness. Its effectiveness as a broad-spectrum antiviral is disputed, though it came into the public consciousness as an off-label treatment for COVID 19. Since then, advocates have pushed to make the drug more widely available for those seeking to use it. Governor Greg Abbott added the issue to the most recent called session. HB 25, sponsored by Edgewood Senator Bob Hall, would permit pharmacists who wish to do so to offer the medication over-the-counter. “This measure ultimately offers all Texans greater medical freedom by increasing treatment options at a much lower price,” said Hall.

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