Senate panel begins negotiations with the House over how to scrap the STAAR test

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A Senate panel early Friday unveiled its rewrite of the House bill that would scrap STAAR, the state standardized test widely criticized for taking instructional time away from teachers and putting pressure on students.

The Senate changes kick off formal negotiations with the lower chamber as the clock is running out on the legislative session. The Senate Education Committee’s rewrite reflects a gap in 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.

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.

“By the time we get to a shorter end-of-year test, we are not concentrating this into a high-stakes anxiety game that basically has teachers and students walking a tightrope,” said Sen. Paul Bettencourt, the Houston Republican sponsoring the bill. “I know there'll be more of this coming out of my House counterparts as we move this bill on.”

The Senate amendments to the legislation absorbs much of the language from Senate Bill 1962, the Senate’s own bill on testing and accountability. 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 wants to grade Texas students by comparing their performance to their peers around the country in what is called a “norm-referenced test.” Proponents of this kind of test say it allows students and their families to get results back faster. The Senate panel does not specify what grading would look like, which would allow the state to continue a rigid scale to track students’ academic performance.

The House also eliminated a mandatory standardized test on social studies, while the Senate chose to retain it.

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 Texas Education Agency 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.

Bettencourt 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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