The Texas Education Agency today announced notable gains in A–F accountability ratings for public schools and districts statewide, with strong year-over-year improvements in both campus and district performance. These ratings, which have been intermittent in recent years due to ongoing litigation, offer valuable transparency to parents, community members and policymakers. A main takeaway from the…
This special session, lawmakers have a chance to do what they nearly accomplished just weeks ago: eliminate the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, better known as the STAAR test, and replace it with something better, shorter and more frequent to allow more opportunity for instruction and make it more useful for students, parents…
It’s open season on the STAAR test and understandably so. Texans are right to expect better assessments that support students, inform instruction and don’t cause undue stress. But let’s be very clear: the solution isn’t to replace STAAR with a test that tells us less about what our kids are actually learning. Unfortunately, that’s exactly…