The Texas House has approved a bill that would eliminate STAAR, the high-stakes standardized test that the state and school districts use to monitor student learning and teacher performance.
“What this does is remove testing from being the center of gravity for the year the way that it is now,” state Rep. Diego Bernal, D-San Antonio, said on the House floor this week. “The days of teaching to the test, if this passes, are over. What we’ve done here is create something that is much more of a tool than a test.”
House Bill 4, which overhauls standardized testing in Texas public schools, got a near unanimous vote in the House on Tuesday, but faces a tough road in the Senate. The upper chamber has its own idea for what an overhaul of the standardized test, and the school rating system largely based on that test’s results, should look like.