Could STAAR elimination lead to more testing in Texas schools?
When lawmakers voted in September to eliminate Texas’ end-of-year state test and replace it with three shorter exams, they said they wanted to reduce the amount of time students spend taking assessments.
But education researchers warn that hasn’t generally been how similar policies have played out elsewhere. In many states, a three-times-a-year assessment model has resulted in students spending more time testing, not less.
“On its own, it’s just not a great solution,” said Morgan Polikoff, a professor in the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education. “And in fact, it seems likely that it might exacerbate problems.”
Texas lawmakers replace STAAR with through-year testing
During this year’s legislative session, lawmakers passed a bill eliminating the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, or STAAR. Beginning with the 2027-28 school year, the state test will be replaced with three shorter assessments that students will take at the beginning, middle and end of the school year, a model known as through-year testing. Lawmakers who supported the bill said it eliminates the high-stakes nature of a single test students take at the end of the year, and gives teachers access to information about how students are performing earlier in the year, when there’s still time to help struggling students catch up.
But as a growing number of states have moved from end-of-year assessments to through-year testing, researchers have urged caution. In a paper released in 2023, researchers at the Center for Assessment, a national nonprofit that advocates for effective assessment policy, wrote that there are clear benefits from through-year testing, but they come with major trade-offs. Under the right circumstances, through-year testing could offer schools timely information about how their programs are performing. But if they want more data, schools have to administer more assessments, which means they spend more time testing and less time on instruction.
Many states that have adopted through-year testing have done so in an effort to reduce the amount of time students spend taking assessments. But that hasn’t generally been the result, researchers wrote — every through-year assessment program resulted in students spending more time testing, not less, researchers wrote.
That’s because state tests don’t happen in isolation, researchers wrote. In addition to state tests, most districts administer other benchmark tests throughout the year, as well as the regular tests students take in class. Moving from a single test at the end of the year to three shorter exams at the beginning, middle and end of the year only reduces the amount of time students spend testing if districts drop their own testing requirements at the same time, researchers wrote.
But while it’s theoretically possible that a single through-year state testing regimen could replace other rounds of assessments that districts already use, that isn’t what’s happened in most states that have tried that model, said Polikoff, the USC professor. Instead, most districts have layered the new state tests on top of all the other assessments they give students throughout the year, he said.
Having students take multiple tests throughout the school year can be useful, Polikoff said, but only if the assessments are closely aligned with the curriculum. But that’s difficult to do at a state level, he said. In Texas, like in most states, the academic standards that lay out what concepts and skills students are expected to master at each grade level are set at the state level. But each district chooses a curriculum that adheres to those standards. That means several curriculums are in use in districts across the state, making it difficult to create a single assessment that aligns with all of them, he said.
Polikoff said he suspects there’s “a little bit of wishful thinking” built into states’ through-year assessment policies. Many policymakers are concerned about the high-stress nature of once-a-year state tests. But unless they also lower the stakes of state tests when they switch to a new assessment model, those policies don’t reduce the amount of stress testing creates, he said.
Testing time causes concern in Fort Worth schools
The amount of time students spend taking tests has been a major source of concern for teachers and parents. A high school teacher in Fort Worth ISD who asked not to be identified by name out of concern about retaliation said she loses weeks of class time to testing each year. Students take MAP benchmark tests in late August, mid-January and early May. High school students take STAAR end-of-course exams in early December and again in April. At the end of every grading period, they take six-week interim assessments. Emergent bilingual students are required to take the state’s English proficiency test in February. And students enrolled in Advanced Placement courses take those exams in May, just before the end of the school year.
STAAR exams and English proficiency tests are state-mandated, and AP exams are required for students to earn college credit for the classes they take in high school. Fort Worth ISD, like many districts nationwide, has students take MAP tests to gauge academic progress. The six-week benchmark tests are intended to measure how well students mastered the unit they completed during that grading period.
The state’s testing guidelines require that districts give students up to seven hours to complete STAAR exams, so test sessions last effectively the entire school day. But even in cases where students don’t spend a whole day testing, a test session can still disrupt the rest of the school day, the teacher said. One day last fall, students took a test in the morning, and the school held a condensed version of a normal class schedule in the afternoon, with 45-minute classes instead of the typical 90 minutes. But the test session ran longer than it was supposed to, which disrupted the planned afternoon schedule. That meant teachers didn’t know what their afternoon schedules would look like until the last minute, giving them almost no time to adjust their plans, she said.
Aside from taking up class time, the teacher said the assessments don’t give teachers much meaningful information about how their students are doing. In many cases, there’s a disconnect between what a class covers in a unit and the questions students see on the six-week assessment at the end of it, she said, so the scores aren’t useful as a measure of how well they understood the material. But even if the tests are designed well, the district’s instructional schedule doesn’t leave enough time for teachers to go over the results and find trends, she said.
“There’s not enough time for us to do anything meaningful with the data,” she said. “So it feels like we’re constantly mining for data and not even using it to make an impact moving forward.”
Testing is a crucial part of teaching, FWISD official says
Nancy Stickstel, Fort Worth ISD’s associate superintendent for transformation, innovation and accountability, pushed back on the idea that testing represents lost instructional time. Assessment is a natural part of instruction, she said — teachers need to be able to see how students are doing so they can make adjustments if necessary. And apart from the days when campuses are administering STAAR tests, students still get some amount of instruction, even if their classes are abbreviated to make time for test sessions, she said.
Although few details have been released on what the state’s new testing model will look like, Sticksel said she expects the tests at the beginning and middle of the year to take 60 to 75 minutes, and the exam at the end of the year to be 90 minutes to two hours. If that’s the case, it would add up to less testing time overall, she said.
Once the state’s new testing model goes into effect, Sticksel said it’s unlikely that the district would continue giving students a MAP test three times a year in addition to the new state assessment. Testing students twice within the same window on the same set of material wouldn’t make sense, she said. The district wouldn’t gain any more information from a second test than it got from the one that’s required by the state, she said.
That being said, Sticksel said testing is a critical part of the instructional process, and always has been. Educators have to be able to see how much of the material students understand in the short term, and how much of it they retain later on. The only way to accomplish that is with a good assessment.
“It’s not lost instructional time when you’re using that data for kids,” she said. “It’s part of the instructional model.”
