End-of-year STAAR exam is bad for Texas kids, schools. Lawmakers should fix it | Opinion

Efforts to reform the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, or STAAR tests, in Texas schools died a slow death in late spring. But in their special session, legislators may consider it again, with a bill to replace “end of year” state assessments with three shorter tests throughout the school year. Like many of my fellow Texas teachers, I’m watching with interest.

STAAR has long been an imperfect standardized assessment on our students, damaging them and our schools. It’s time to say goodbye to STAAR.

Lawmakers should at least de-emphasize this cumbersome, pressurized and faulty system of assessing our students and schools. Even defenders of the exam readily acknowledge its “plenty of flaws,” which include inconsistent scoring, disproportionate weight in school “accountability,” and a failure to deliver on the promise of reflecting students’ content mastery.

Not that we haven’t tried. Testing’s roots in public schools date back to the 18th century in the United States, and over the years in Texas, it has looked a lot of different ways, sometimes even shifting year over year as we “innovate.” For example, as a graduate of Arlington ISD in 2005, I took the “TAKS” test as a high school senior, yet my sister took a very similar “TAAS” exam just one year prior. Were our experiences that different?

More importantly, is the current STAAR test really better than the acronyms that came before it?

Take a look at scoring. Just last year, hundreds of students’ STAAR exams were scored erroneously, leading to an appeal from my district, DISD. The original scores had been automated, but a subsequent rescore completed by a human led to an improvement in about a third of students’ scores. That is wildly problematic, and as a parent myself, it doesn’t seem far-fetched that an unfair score could affect my kid, or yours.

Even one improperly scored exam calls into question the reliability of our school accountability system in Texas. Test scores are the primary metric we use to rate our public schools, driving the public perception of their overall performance. Ratings are often among the first things a family looks up when moving to a new location. They might even drive parents to remove their kids from a great public school in favor of an expensive private program — which, ironically, would not even have to administer STAAR, driving home the inconsistency of import we place on these evaluations.

It is not surprising that part of the debate that killed the legislation during the regular legislative session entailed disagreement over the application of school ratings.

Throw into the mix that standardized test scores do not even predict long-term outcomes for students, and that they cost a fortune for state taxpayers, and you can see that this is not a niche issue.

In fact, doing away with STAAR is a popular issue among parents, teachers, and students alike. A popular joke in my profession involves saying “STAAR” in a crowded room of teachers, after which you won’t be able to hear yourself think over the chorus of booing.

Further, many respected district leaders believe replacing the test is the right thing to do for Texas families. As my own superintendent in the Dallas school district, Dr. Stephanie Elizalde, has written, the exam “assesses only a portion of state standards and is unable to measure how much a student learns and grows over the course of a school year.” It leads to inauthentic teaching and learning, as the undue pressure on students (and teachers) inevitably diminishes best practices in favor of rote test-taking strategies.

A better regime for testing our kids should take the form of a norm-referenced model, which compares students to each other rather than against an arbitrary collection of criteria. It should also replace end-of-year-test stress with more frequent, lower-stakes assessments that track student growth, providing teachers with crucial formative data along the way. The current STAAR is given in April, leaving teachers with about 20 instructional days after administration that could be the difference between passing and failing for many students.

Our state legislators must revisit this issue and send STAAR packing; it is problematic for schools at best, and harmful to kids at worst. At the very least, its results must be decoupled from our draconian school rating system. Only then will stakeholders in holding our schools “accountable” be able to sincerely open the door for sensible solutions.

Otherwise, we run the risk of crying foul when our schools “fail” based on fundamentally erroneous or unimportant data, leading to less funding, which could ultimately usher in the exact failure we are trying to prevent.

Lance Barasch is a high school math teacher at the Townview School of Science and Engineering in the Dallas school district. He is a Teach Plus Leading Edge Fellow.

This story was originally published August 7, 2025 at 4:50 AM.