Educators Hate It, So Why Is Texas Keeping the STAAR Test Alive?
Behind efforts to eliminate the state test that stresses kids out and shuts schools down
By Brant Bingamon, Fri., May 23, 2025
Lots of people hate the STAAR test – students (of course), teachers (of course), but also parents and principals. Austin state representative Gina Hinojosa has a story she tells to demonstrate her feelings about STAAR.
“My son, when he was in second grade at Becker Elementary, was doing a STAAR practice test in preparation for third grade,” Hinojosa told us. “Third grade is the first year kids have to take the STAAR, so they were already doing STAAR prep in second grade. And he was tired of sitting there doing this practice test, so he complained to his teacher, and his teacher said, 'Pablo, you’re going to have to sit for much longer than this next year to do the actual STAAR.’ So at that point, he made the decision that he was done.”
Pablo asked his teacher for permission to go to the bathroom. When he got outside class he darted for Becker’s front door. An assistant principal caught him and called Hinojosa. She picked up her son.
“He told me he planned to wait for me in the bushes,” she said. “I mean, it sounds funny, right? But this is what the STAAR test, and the pressure of it, does to little kids. It’s too much.”
The STAAR – its full name is the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness – is the test given to all public school students at the end of each school year in grades three through 12. It’s the primary way Texas decides how kids, schools, and school districts are performing. The results are the basis for A-F grades given to kids and schools.
The test can, and does, label kids and entire neighborhoods as failures. The kids and neighborhoods are almost exclusively poor and minority. Here in Austin, the test recently labeled 30 of our 116 school communities as failures, almost all of them on the Eastside.
The Dobie Middle School community in the Rundberg area of Northeast Austin is one of those. Dobie’s assistant principal, Chadrick Holloway, told us Dobie’s kids and teachers were looking forward to STAAR testing this April – the school has been improving and the community expected higher grades this year. But then came the news that the school had scored an F on its 2023 assessment and that Austin ISD planned to shut the school down. The hopeful mood collapsed, but the testing went on.
Holloway said the testing takes a toll on students. “It does make them nervous. It is a long test. They do know what’s on the line, and they do feel the pressure, and they try hard. And it is stressful. We do see a spike in negative behaviors. We’ll see people acting out, walking out of class, maybe trying to skip a little bit more, or maybe being a little bit more verbally aggressive.”
Austin ISD board member Kathryn Whitley Chu taught math at Pearce Middle School in Southeast Austin from 2012-2014, the last two years before Texas closed the school for low performance and reimagined it as the Bertha Sadler Means Young Women’s Leadership Academy. Pearce was under intense pressure from the Texas Education Agency and Austin ISD to bring up its test scores in those final years.
“Frequently, as my students were trying to learn, a group of suited adults with clipboards would swarm the room unannounced, circling desks, hovering over students, and making notes,” Whitley Chu told us. “They’d choose an 11-year-old, get close to their face, and ask, 'What is your learning objective today?’ – staring straight at them with their pen on the clipboard.”
Whitley Chu described what it was like on testing days. “Students were required to sit quietly until everyone was done testing. The students had silent lunches on those days because they were not supposed to talk about the test. Those days were miserable. Testing days were so strict that my sixth graders were required to stay in the same classroom all day, so noise in the hall wouldn’t be a distraction to other students. Students were cooped up and packed into classrooms because teachers were pulled to administer STAAR tests for other grades.”
Whitley Chu felt that in one way or another, every hour of her teaching through the year was devoted to helping students succeed on the test. She said teachers worried they could be disciplined, even go to jail, for allowing students to talk on test days. After all, violating testing security is a class C misdemeanor. She said when eighth graders failed the test they would have to take it again. If they didn’t pass the second test they would have to go to summer school and do a four-hour practice test, followed by another four-hour test. A struggling learner could be subjected to 32 hours of STAAR testing in their eighth grade school year alone.
“Can you imagine anything more demoralizing and less beneficial to the student?” she asked. “It’s completely demoralizing to be subjected to a developmentally inappropriate test that can label you a failure. The state is harming children with this requirement, period. Learning should be fun and not punitive. This nonsense has been going on for so long, people do not stop and think how ridiculous and awful it is.”
Test and Punish
Accountability testing has been going on in Texas since 1979, when the state first began to assess its public school students in the third, fifth, and ninth grades. The tests have changed names over the years, expanded, and gotten harder with increased standards.
STAAR replaced the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in 2012. Students first take STAAR in the third grade and continue taking it each year until they graduate high school or drop out. Through elementary and middle school they take separate tests in English and math. In grades five and eight they also take tests in science. They take a social studies test in grade eight. In high school, they take STAAR tests at the end of courses in English I and II, algebra, biology, and U.S. history. The tests last up to four hours in each subject.
STAAR is exclusive to Texas. The state, through the Texas Education Agency, hires a company to write the test – the agency signed contracts worth almost $400 million to revamp the test in 2021 – and then tweaks it. TEA scores the tests and uses the scores to figure the A-F grades. STAAR results account for 40% of a high school’s letter grade. The rest is determined by the school’s graduation rate and how many of its graduates are judged ready for careers or college.
In elementary and middle schools, STAAR results constitute 100% of a school’s A-F rating.
STAAR and the A-F system are the results of changes to education that then-Gov. George W. Bush ushered through the Texas Legislature from 1995-2000. Many of the changes became part of Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind, when he took office as president in 2001.
No Child Left Behind required schools across the country to test for reading and math in grades three through eight and at least once in high school. It mandated that districts rate schools on the basis of the tests and report the performance of different student demographics. It created sanctions – punishments – for schools that didn’t meet the program’s targets. If a school failed to meet targets for four consecutive years, its teachers could be replaced. If it failed to meet the targets for five consecutive years, it could be closed.
“There was a lot of really draconian stuff in that law,” Louis Malfaro of the local nonprofit Austin Voices for Education and Youth said. “Well, it didn’t work. It turns out closing a school in a poor neighborhood doesn’t help those kids learn more. It turns out that taking all the teachers at a low-income school that already had a 20% annual turnover rate, and getting rid of all of them – including the ones that had been there for years and actually knew the kids and the families – isn’t a recipe for success.”
Educators began reconsidering the value of No Child Left Behind soon after its passage. In 2015, during Barack Obama’s presidency, Congress passed a reform scaling back the program – the Every Student Succeeds Act. ESSA still requires states to give most of the tests and compile most of the results that No Child Left Behind did. but what they do with the results is up to them. They don’t have to close struggling schools or rename them or fire teachers or create partnerships with charter schools.
With ESSA’s passage, many states abandoned the sanctions that had been integral to No Child Left Behind. Texas didn’t. The same year ESSA was approved, our lawmakers passed House Bill 1842, a law codifying most of No Child Left Behind’s punitive rules. It remains in effect.
Under HB 1842 and later amendments to it, schools that don’t meet accountability ratings for two years in a row are required to submit turnaround plans, which the commissioner of the TEA – appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott – has the sole authority to approve. If the commissioner rejects a turnaround plan, TEA may close the low-performing school or take over the entire district, by replacing its elected board of trustees with a hand-picked board of managers. In 2019, lawmakers added the A-F grades to the system. In 2021, they reworked the school-closure rules, echoing No Child Left Behind by requiring that if even one school in a given district received five F ratings in a row, TEA must close the school or take over the district.
Malfaro said that state lawmakers’ choices over the last 10 years have been ruinous ones for Texas education. “The rest of the country got on a different ship and sailed away from Test and Punish Island,” Malfaro said. “Not Texas. We doubled down. We passed A-F, a consummately stupid system that says we can distill down the essence of your kid to a letter grade.”
Measuring Poverty and Calling It Performance
Educators do not trust STAAR and the A-F system. A 2022 survey of 1,291 Texas public school teachers by the Charles Butt Foundation found that 98% lacked confidence in the A-F system. 81% said STAAR places too much pressure on students and forces teachers to teach to the test. 77% said they were seriously considering leaving the profession in part because of the state’s accountability system.
But educators believe there is one thing STAAR does reliably measure – the economic status of the kids it grades. “The correlation between income and test scores continues to be strong and you can interpret that in two ways,” David Kauffman, an AISD trustee and former principal, told us. “You can interpret that as we’re failing to properly serve poor kids. But you can also look at it and say this is a bigger problem than just instruction – dealing with segregated schools in a segregated society where opportunities are different depending on your income.”
Economically secure students score better on STAAR for several reasons, researchers theorize. They are typically fluent in English. Many arrive in kindergarten already able to read and write. Their families move to new homes less, so they attend school more regularly. All of these are highly correlated with academic success.
By contrast, 87% of the students at Dobie Middle School, the embattled minority school in East Austin, are economically disadvantaged. 72% have limited English proficiency. Dobie’s students move more often than students at most schools in the district. It also has high numbers of students from foreign countries, some of whom received insufficient schooling, or none at all, before arriving in America, Chadrick Holloway told us.
Holloway said that Dobie, with an attendance of about 500, has kids from Mexico, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Cuba, Morocco, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. School officials say 30 languages are spoken at the school. “We just got a student the other day: She’s deaf, but she does American Sign Language a little bit and she speaks Igbo,” Holloway said. “So that’s two languages right there. We also have Kinyarwanda, Pashtu, Dari, Farsi – and Spanish is the biggest one.”
Spanish speakers are allowed to take STAAR in their native tongue until the fifth grade. Thereafter, they must take it in English. Those new to the country have a one-year buffer period before they begin receiving scores on STAAR. Afterward, regardless of where they are with their English acquisition, the scores count. “But if you’ve been in the country a year and you’ve never spoken the language before, is a year enough to proficiently show your knowledge on a subject?” Holloway asks.
Questions like this intensified after TEA released a set of new rules for STAAR in 2022. STAAR 2.0, as it’s being called, increases the score necessary for high schools to get an A in the accountability ratings. It requires kids to take the test on a computer, forcing them to work with drop-down menus, highlighting, and keyboarding – something that disadvantages kids who are unfamiliar with computers, as kids from foreign countries and impoverished backgrounds often are. It reduces the number of multiple choice questions on the test, adding a writing component called the “extended constructed response,” which requires kids to type short essays in their own words. TEA grades about three-fourths of the extended constructed response answers with automated intelligence – like artificial intelligence but without the learning.
“The essay questions are graded by AI, and these are English language learners,” said Barbara Boutette, a special education teacher at Burnet Middle School, which, like Dobie, recently received an F in the accountability ratings. “So there are times when their answer actually does make sense – you can tell that they’re comprehending the question – but they didn’t put the words together in the way that the AI needed them to.”
Test results for the first year of STAAR 2.0 showed a huge spike in the numbers of students who received zeros on the essay portion of the test. Before STAAR 2.0, about 5% of students across the state scored a zero out of eight possible points. Afterward, according to an analysis of test results by the Houston Defender, roughly half of fourth graders scored a zero out of 10 points. One in five seventh graders and one in four high schoolers scored zeros. Dallas ISD distrusted the AI grades so much that it paid TEA to have humans regrade 4,600 of its students’ answers, at $50 per appeal. 43% of the answers submitted got higher grades.
When the 2023 A-F grades based on the new STAAR results were released this April, scores for schools across the state collapsed. One in five schools received a D or F rating – a 233% increase over the previous year, according to The Texas Tribune. Officials from a Houston area district calculated that D’s and F’s jumped statewide from 561 in 2022 to 1,913 in 2023. In Austin, the lower scores caused AISD to drop from a B to a C district. Thirty AISD schools received an F. Sixteen fell from a B to an F.
But TEA Commissioner Mike Morath defended the accuracy of the scores, calling them “a clear view of school performance.” Morath’s reaction was unsurprising to longtime observers of public education in Texas. They say the A-F scores support a narrative the Republican Party has pushed for decades: Public schools are failing students and private schools are the answer.
Louis Malfaro said he believes this spring’s A-F scores helped Gov. Abbott win the approval of school vouchers, Abbott’s personal quest to allow parents to take taxpayer money out of public schools and use it for private schooling. Malfaro thinks that is one of the reasons the test is still around – it can be used to support a political leader’s desired message.
“TEA controls the STAAR test,” Malfaro said. “They’re able to manipulate it internally. And so if the commissioner wants to have a good year – let’s say Greg Abbott is running for reelection and he wants to point to school improvement – well, the commissioner can deliver him that school improvement. And likewise, if it’s a legislative year, and we want to show how shitty the public schools are, so that we can pass private school vouchers, the commissioner will accommodate. It’s such a corrupt system.”
The Supernova Bill
Grassroots Republicans have less use for STAAR, however. On April 30, after a long day at the state Capitol, Republican Rep. Brad Buckley introduced House Bill 4 to his fellow legislators, leading with a pitch he knew would resonate. “House Bill 4 eliminates the STAAR test,” Buckley said. “You’re not just tired. That’s what I said. And that’s what this bill does.”
Buckley went on to say that “nobody trusts the STAAR test” and that it is time for the state to “get out of the test-making business.” He noted that researchers estimate teachers spend 18 days, about 10% of the school year, prepping students for the STAAR. “That’s not just bad policy, it’s foolish,” Buckley said.
Buckley’s bill got a lot of praise from school employees and advocates that evening. Justin Terry, the superintendent of Forney ISD outside Dallas, estimated that eliminating STAAR would cut testing days by half and save districts hundreds of thousands of dollars. James Cureton of Tyler ISD said it would return months of instructional time to teachers. Dee Carney of the Texas Center for School Accountability praised Buckley for working with school superintendents and “actually taking their feedback.”
HB 4 passed the House of Representatives on May 12 by a vote of 143-1. If it’s approved by the Senate (which is not at all certain) and signed by the governor (also not certain) the TEA will be required to replace STAAR this fall with an off-the-shelf test like MAP Growth from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. MAP Growth and tests like it are norm-referenced, like the SAT, which means they rate a student’s performance by comparing it to the entire group of students who are tested. Norm-referenced tests aim to determine what grade level a student is reading at and what their strengths and individual needs are.
MAP Growth is given to students three times a year – at the beginning, middle, and end of a school year – but the tests are shorter than STAAR’s, only 60-90 minutes per subject. Unlike STAAR’s results, which aren’t released for weeks, MAP Growth’s results come back within a day. The multiple tests and quick turnaround of results allow teachers to adjust lessons during the year. The test provides a fuller picture of a student’s development, especially students who may grow quickly, like those learning English or receiving tutoring, because the questions become harder or easier depending on a student’s previous answers, focusing more minutely on what the student has learned. Generally, educators say tests like MAP Growth are cheaper and more useful than STAAR.
Students in Austin ISD already take the MAP Growth test, so if HB 4 is adopted in its current form they will be tested less. That’s important because education advocates believe that testing has gotten out of control. “Schools are not only giving the STAAR test, but they are giving MAP Growth tests, and they are giving the interim [STAAR] test,” said Bob Popinski of education advocates Raise Your Hand Texas. “If you’re emergent bilingual, we have the TELPAS test [the Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System] on top of everything. So we have a lot of tests being thrown at our kids. And what you see from both sides of the aisle is, 'Hey, I think we’ve gone too far in the amount we’re testing.’”
Though it jettisons STAAR, HB 4 keeps the state’s A-F system. Popinski told us there is simply no appetite among most educators and lawmakers for abandoning test-based accountability. However, the bill does change the way schools are rated, requiring that at least 10% of a school’s total grade be determined by what it calls “student engagement and workforce development indicators.” The “indicators” can give schools higher grades if they have large numbers of students participating in extracurricular programs or in full-day pre-kindergarten. Elementary schools can get higher grades if their teachers complete professional development courses in literacy and math. Middle schools can score higher if their students pass career and technical education courses.
Dobie Middle School might not have been facing the threat of closure if HB 4’s indicator rules had been in place in 2023. That year, the school scored a 51 in the A-F ratings. An extra 10 points from an indicator category would have given it a D, something that would have bought Austin ISD an additional year to help improve the school’s scores.
Instead, Dobie’s poor performance is forcing the district to propose a turnaround plan for the school which will replace its principals and about half of its teachers. Two other AISD middle schools, Webb and Burnet, are in the same position. District leaders recently told the school communities that each school has four months, starting in August, to raise their scores to a C in the 2026 ratings. Otherwise, they will be handed over to charter schools.
The schools could get a reprieve, however, if HB 4 is adopted in its current form. Rep. James Talarico got an amendment attached to the bill at its approval on May 12 which would give the schools two more years to improve their scores before they’re closed or taken over. But there is only a week left before the legislative session ends and no assurance that the Senate will bring the bill up for a vote, despite the fact that all but one of the Republicans in the House of Representatives approved it.
“It would be an incredible step forward if we could do this,” Austin State Rep. Gina Hinojosa told us in a call from the House floor. “But I’m not holding my breath. I’ve been disappointed in this building too many times.”
Regardless of what happens with the bill, public school supporters will continue to seek a better way for the education system to judge the accomplishments of schools like Dobie Middle School.
“An accountability system that allows for the results of one small group of the students to impact the entire democratic structure of local school systems, there’s something wrong with that system,” David Kauffman said. “And it ignores the fact that Dobie Middle School is serving its community beautifully right now. It has to do better in making sure that kids are being prepared to pass this test, but it’s ignoring the fact that they’re creating opportunities for kids to participate in arts and music and theatre, opportunities that they want to have. It ignores the fact that there’s new leadership there that’s bringing pride to the neighborhood and building kids up. It ignores the fact that there are teachers there who want to be there, who love the kids in the community.
“Those things all have value beyond just the test scores that kids get and they contribute to the long-term academic success we all want our students to experience.”
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