Both Republicans and Democrats have said STAAR sets students up for failure, raising questions about basing a state takeover on the test’s results.
A takeover is meant to correct the course of struggling school districts. But it can become a fraught process since the district’s elected school board loses its decision-making power.
The North Texas district is the 11th since 2000 to be taken over by the state and the second largest after Houston ISD.
House Bill 8 scraps the unpopular exam for three shorter tests at the beginning, middle and end of the year starting in the 2027-28 school year.
Democrats say recent changes to the bill give too much power to the TEA and fall short of meaningfully easing the pressures of standardized testing.
In the 2024-25 school year, 14% of Texas school districts got an A, 71% got a B or a C, and 15% got a D or an F, new state data shows.
The chambers differ on how much power districts should have to push back in courts over their accountability ratings. They risk keeping STAAR by default if they don’t reach an agreement.
The Texas Education Agency released the 2022-23 school year ratings on Thursday after a 19-month legal battle over how those ratings are calculated.
Failing grades for districts were made public for the first time since 2019. They showed schools with the poorest students were more likely to get a low score.
School leaders have privately criticized a bill that would make it harder to contest their performance ratings in court. But they did not testify against it to avoid lawmakers’ ire.
Dozens of districts sued Texas saying the ratings painted an unfair picture of their schools. Others voluntarily have released their own.
The superintendents said they haven’t received enough support from the state or time to fix errors the system generated.
The Texas Education Agency says there’s time to fix problems before officially reported data is used to determine how much money districts get.
An appeals court granted the state approval to release the ratings after doing the same for 2023 scores in April.
Lawmakers at a Texas Tribune Fest panel found common ground on school funding and teacher pay but took starkly different stances on “school choice.”
Test results have gone up since the pandemic in both subjects, but math scores are still below 2019 levels and about half of Texas students read below the level appropriate for most children in their grade.
Texas’ education agency first moved to take over the district in 2019 after years of low student performance at a single Houston ISD high school. Critics said the district has made improvements since then.
Rural school leaders in Texas have been able to stave off the legislative priority of some of the state’s most prominent Republicans. But private school officials hope this year will be different.