It feels like Texas Republicans want to claim they eliminated the STAAR test, public school advocates say, but without actually getting rid of it. On Tuesday, the state’s dominant party passed a bill in the Texas House which would replace the widely disliked end-of-year test given to students in grades 3-12 with three shorter tests spaced at the beginning, middle, and end of the school year. Rep. Gina Hinojosa and her Democratic colleagues voted against the bill.
“They’re claiming it eliminates the STAAR; really, it just changes the STAAR,” Hinojosa said. “House Bill 8 would triple the amount of state-mandated, state-created testing in the classroom per year. It creates more testing at a time when we hear constantly from parents and teachers in our neighborhood public schools that we need less testing.”
HB 8 sets the length of the three tests at 1.5 hours each, rather than the four hours currently allotted for each portion of the STAAR. Bob Popinski of Raise Your Hand Texas said the bill requires the first two tests to be norm-referenced – that is, to score a student’s performance in comparison with other students. “ISDs can choose the first two tests from a list maintained by the Texas Education Agency, most likely MAP Growth, Renaissance, all the familiar tests schools give now, as well as a TEA-designed option,” Popinski said. “But the last test is basically just STAAR as we know it.” Like STAAR, the last test would be criterion-referenced, meaning that it would be scored in the traditional way, by how many of the questions posed by TEA that the students get right.
One thing both sides like about HB 8 is that it requires the test results to be returned within 48 hours, unlike the current system, where they come back weeks after kids take the STAAR, while they’re on summer break. The bill’s supporters say this change, combined with the fact that there would now be tests at the beginning and middle of the school year, would allow teachers to adjust instruction quickly to focus on students’ needs while they’re still in class.
“House Bill 8 would triple the amount of state-mandated, state-created testing in the classroom per year.” – State Rep. Gina Hinojosa
HB 8’s author, Republican Rep. Brad Buckley, argued during debate on the bill that it responds to all the concerns he’s heard from educators and parents. He said that spreading testing over the year will ease the anxiety students feel in taking STAAR, one of the biggest arguments against it. Hinojosa disagrees. She said the tests would still be high-stakes, but now the stress will be spread throughout the school year. She also emphasized that the Texas Education Agency will retain the power to create and score the tests. The agency’s deeply distrusted A-F accountability system, based on the test scores, will remain in place too.
This stands in stark contrast to the provisions of HB 4, a bill offered during the regular session which House Republicans and Democrats passed 143-1 but which died in the Senate. HB 4 would have required the TEA to replace STAAR with an off-the-shelf test, like MAP Growth. Such exams are already administered by schools across the country, including many Texas public schools. Like the tests proposed in HB 8, they are norm-referenced and given three times a year.
Public school advocates support MAP Growth largely because it isn’t a TEA product, so it can’t be manipulated by the agency. For years, educators have criticized TEA for its sudden changes to STAAR, like the ones in 2023 which caused students’ scores to crash across the state, allowing the agency to threaten to take over school districts and giving Gov. Greg Abbott an easy way to argue that Texas needed to implement private school vouchers in response to what he called “failing public schools.”
Austin ISD Trustee Kathryn Whitley Chu, a former teacher, explained how educators understand the relationship between leaders like Abbott, the TEA, and STAAR. “The state of Texas underfunds public schools,” Whitley Chu said. “TEA writes the state’s learning standards, creates the STAAR tests, grades the STAAR tests using unreliable AI, decides what score equals a passing grade, and then says schools are failing and they can take them over. The state is taking more and more power from local schools, and parents know that it is really the state failing our kids.”
Hinojosa told the Chronicle that HB 8 does not change this dynamic. She did get an amendment added to the bill during debate, however, that would limit testing to only the subjects required under federal law, something that would lower the number of days devoted to testing. “I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that it makes it a good bill,” Hinojosa said. “But if we can keep testing limited to just the federal requirements, that helps a whole lot. If my amendment doesn’t stick in the Senate, then they’ve just created a STAAR-zilla. It will just take over the entire school year.”
This article appears in August 29 • 2025.
