Texas House, Senate will seek middle ground on bill to scrap STAAR test

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The Texas House and Senate will kick off negotiations on a bill that would scrap STAAR, the state standardized test widely criticized for taking instructional time away from teachers and putting enormous burdens on students.

House Bill 4 would swap the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness test for a shorter test that aims to better support student learning. Students would be tested at the beginning, middle and end of the year to monitor their progress.

The House version of the bill got near unanimous support earlier this month. The bill then got a 23-8 vote in the Senate but not before the upper chamber did a rewrite of the legislation. That Senate rewrite reflects the gap between what the two chambers want to see out of the new state assessment — and the A-F accountability ratings that are largely calculated based on assessment results.

"We sent a transformational school assessment accountability reform bill from the House to the Senate," Rep. Brad Buckley, the author of the legislation, said on the House floor Thursday. "They have changed multiple parts of it. They have waded into some areas where I feel like ... [it] does not really meet the moment of what we need in our schools."

The House and Senate will continue negotiations in a closed-door conference committee as the clock running out on the legislative session.

The Senate's own bill on testing and accountability, Senate Bill 1962, met its demise earlier this week when it failed to meet a key House deadline to be heard on the chamber floor. That makes the two chambers's negotiations over HB 4 critical if legislators want to make good on their promises to end the STAAR test.

The Senate changes to HB 4 absorbs much of the language from SB 1962. The House had started the session with much of that language but moved away from it after public testimony and closed-door meetings with school leaders.

The House favors grading Texas students by comparing their performance to their peers around the country, what is known as a “norm-referenced test.” Proponents of this kind of test say it allows students and their families to get results back faster. The House also wants to eliminate a mandatory standardized test on social studies.

The Senate, meanwhile, wants to give the Texas Education Agency more flexibility on how to grade students, keep the mandatory social studies test and make the beginning and middle-of-the-year assessments optional.

Students’ STAAR performance is a key metric in the state's ratings of school districts and school campuses, which are graded on an A-F scale each year. School performance ratings were held up in court because of two consecutive years with lawsuits.

The House’s bill also left an avenue for districts to sue to challenge the TEA in the future, but set up a fast-track court process so those lawsuits do not halt the release of the ratings. The Senate’s bill, meanwhile, doubled down on discouraging schools from taking legal action again. It gives the TEA commissioner, for example, the option to appoint a conservator to districts that initiate a lawsuit.

Sen. Paul Bettencourt, the Houston Republican sponsoring the bill in the Senate, has repeatedly slammed districts who joined the lawsuits over the A-F ratings in the past, calling the action “lawfare.”

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

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