Claudia de Leon describes her son Diego’s kindergarten class at Houston’s Helms Elementary School as “magical.” His teacher taught the students to examine each feature of their face and then sketch them one by one to create life-like self portraits. Another teacher played songs on his guitar to aid the kids’ learning. Diego’s next two years at Helms Elementary were filled with similar joyous hands-on learning in the core subjects. So in the third grade, when Diego told his mom he didn’t want to go back to school, de Leon assumed he was being bullied. 

She later found out Diego, an A and B student, feared he would fail third grade. His teachers had told him that he would be held back if he didn’t pass the state standardized test, known as the STAAR test, and that teachers at the school would receive a poor evaluation and be fired if their students’ scores were low. 

That year, 2012, was the first year the STAAR test—formally called the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness—was administered to students as a singular test that was meant to measure what students learned all year in particular core subjects. It was then that de Leon started a campaign for parents in the Houston Independent School District to opt their children out of taking the STAAR test. 

For the next 10 years until Diego graduated high school in 2022, he never took the STAAR. “I felt that the whole system was unjust and immoral,” de Leon said. She said she supports testing when it’s used to improve student learning, not to punish students, teachers, and schools. “Instead, people were going to lose their jobs; heads were going to roll, and it was all on the backs of the kids.” 

As the culture and curriculum at Helms Elementary and other schools became more consumed with test prep—worksheets replaced science labs; STAAR excerpts replaced whole books; multiple-choice tests replaced essay writing—more parents and students joined Houston’s opt-out movement, which has largely been organized by the parent organization Community Voices for Public Education. It’s also spread across the state. Scott Placek has been guiding parents on how to opt out of STAAR since 2013 through the group Texans Take Action Against the STAAR, whose Facebook group has more than 80,000 members. He says the high-stakes testing culture has become so intense that school administrators have threatened parents with arrests and calls to Child Protective Services to discourage families from opting out. 

“The state is using the assessment to punish campuses and teachers and other students … and parents don’t want to be a part of that system,” Placek told the Texas Observer. 

As the opt-out movement has grown over the years, Texas legislators from both parties have proposed bills that would eliminate or otherwise replace the STAAR test. (Students are required to take a total of 20 STAAR tests between 3rd and 12th grades). In 2021, the House passed a bill that would have eliminated standardized tests not required by federal law and allowed districts to replace exit exams with national standardized tests, like the ACT or the SAT. But that bill died in the Senate, as did a similar bill filed this regular session. After the House and Senate failed to reach a compromise on STAAR legislation during the regular session, Governor Greg Abbott made replacement of the STAAR test one of the 18 items on his special session call. 

The fate of that measure, and many others, has been temporarily thrown into uncertainty after House Democrats left the state to break quorum and stall passage of the GOP’s new redistricting map. But many parents who have long fought to reform the STAAR and how it’s used to evaluate students, teachers, and schools remain on guard, warning that the latest proposals are still far cry from their demands to lower the stakes of standardized testing. 

The two chamber’s primary testing bills in the current special session, Senate Bill 8 and House Bill 8, would replace the STAAR test with three shorter tests at the beginning, middle, and end of each school year, with requirements to generate the results more quickly, and update the test every five years to increase its level of difficulty. The stakes would be even higher for individual schools and school districts as he state’s A-F school rating system would still be largely tied to standardized test results and the Texas Education Agency’s (TEA) power to sanction local ISDs under would increase. The TEA commissioner currently has the power to set school rating standards, assign ratings, and takeover school districts if just one campus receives a failing rating for five consecutive years. Under the proposed bill, the commissioner would have the sole authority to modify school rating standards at any time and the power to assign schools a rating every year regardless of the circumstances. School districts would also be prohibited from using public dollars to challenge state ratings in court—a clear reaction to the lawsuits filed by Texas school districts in the last two years. Disputes would instead be heard by a standing legislative committee. 

During the regular session, House lawmakers fought provisions in the Senate bill that would further empower the state education commissioner and sought measures that would mandate legislative approval before the TEA makes changes to the rating system. But House Republicans have apparently abandoned that effort as the Public Education Committee Chairman Brad Buckley jointly filed an identical bill with the Texas Senate last week. 

“What gets measured gets fixed,” said SB 8 author Senator Paul Bettencourt during the Senate Committee on Education hearing on the bill last Wednesday. “This bill measures student success in a fair way, while ending the era of STAAR stress and taxpayer-funded lawsuits against the public accountability system in Texas.”

Rachael Abell, a representative of the Texas PTA disagreed. “Reforming the test without adjusting how it’s used in ratings won’t fix the pressure schools are under. And that pressure shows up in our kids’ classrooms, and until we fix the student assessment and the student school accountability system, students will continue to be taught to the test,” Abell testified at the hearing. 

While there have been other iterations of Texas standardized tests since the 1980s—such as the TABS, the TEAMS, the TAAS, and then the TAKS—the stakes became higher in 1993 when Texas passed a law to measure campus performance using state standardized test scores. In 2001, George W. Bush brought this education policy with him to Washington as a model for the No Child Left Behind Act, ushering in a high-stakes testing culture in schools across the country. 

By 2012, then-TEA Commissioner Robert Scott told school officials in a public address that the state’s testing system had gone too far and had become a “perversion of its original intent.” Among his criticisms was the oversized reliance on the STAAR test to determine ratings for schools and school districts.

“What we’ve done in the past decade, is we’ve doubled down on the test every couple of years, and used it for more and more things, to make it the end-all, be-all,” he said. “You’ve reached a point now of having this one thing that the entire system is dependent upon. It is the heart of the vampire, so to speak.”

His remarks helped to spur a nationwide rebellion. That summer, more than 830 school districts in Texas signed a resolution stating that standardized testing was “strangling” education and calling for an overhaul of the high-stakes testing system. In 2013, Texas parents successfully pushed the Texas Legislature to remove a provision that required 15 percent of a course grade to be based on standardized test scores and to reduce the number of state-mandated high school exit exams from 15 to five. In 2016, parents with Community Voices for Public Education succeeded in ending the practice of using STAAR scores to promote students to certain grades in Houston ISD, although it wasn’t until 2021 when the state finally eliminated this practice altogether. 

In 2015, No Child Left Behind was repealed and replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act, which, while still requiring states to have a school accountability system and standardized tests, granted states more flexibility in setting academic standards, standardized assessments, and rating systems. Since then other states have steadily moved away from using high-stakes testing to punish students and schools. 

That same year, though, Texas doubled down on its punitive school rating system by enacting a law that empowers the Texas Education Agency to either close down campuses or takeover a school district and depose its elected school board when just one school receives a failing rating for five consecutive years. In 2017, it established the A-F rating system; previously, schools were either rated as “passing” or “improvement required.”

The Lone Star State remains one of only six states to still require high school students to pass a standardized test to graduate and, according to the policy group Education Commission of the States, Texas is also one of only six states to use the A-F system to rate schools. In contrast, 14 states use a “federal tiers of support” system to indicate what type of aid schools need to provide for students scoring lower on standardized tests.

In 2021, the state passed another law making it easier for the agency to seize school districts after Houston ISD legally challenged TEA’s attempt to take over. That 2021 law expanded failing ratings to include D and not just F ratings and granted the TEA commissioner “final and unappealable” authority to take over school districts.

In 2023, TEA took over Houston ISD, appointing Mike Miles to lead the school district and replacing its elected board with a state appointed board of managers. Under Miles, parents and teachers have complained the high-stakes testing culture has only intensified—students now end each class everyday with a timed multiple choice test. 

Miles has boasted that his reforms in Houston ISD have raised STAAR scores in the district. During last Wednesday’s hearing TEA commissioner Mike Morath stated other districts “should be copying [the changes] that we see in Houston.” He didn’t mention recent news reports that revealed Miles boosted biology STAAR scores by forcing students at struggling schools to take that STAAR exam a year later or by preventing students at schools targeted for reform from taking advanced math and science courses. 

“They’re erasing a generation of STEM likely students of color in the largest school district in Texas,” said Ruth Kravetz, the executive director of Community Voices for Public Education and a former educator and school administrator in Houston ISD. “The test is so high-stakes now that it eliminates anything else that is also beneficial for kids.”

A month after TEA took over Houston ISD, more than 120 school districts sued TEA claiming TEA Commissioner Mike Morath changed school rating standards without providing sufficient notice or transparency. In 2024, 30 school districts again sued TEA over concerns that the new automated system would unfairly assess the STAAR, particularly its essay portion. Both efforts failed. 

The Senate’s version for the STAAR replacement in the regular session permitted TEA to assign a conservator to school districts that sued TEA. While that provision was dropped in the new versions, districts would have even more hurdles to clear under the bill if they want to challenge state ratings. 

TEA will release ratings for the most recent two school years on August 15. In April, the Texas Tribune reported that one in five Texas schools received a D or F rating in 2023 under Morath’s revised performance standards and that most of those schools enroll predominantly low-income students. Based on the 2023 scores, Fort Worth ISD, which is the 10th largest school district in Texas, is at risk of state takeover. 

At the Senate education committee hearing, Morath said that he is discussing options with Fort Worth ISD leaders and would visit its schools ahead of making a decision. “The goal of whatever decision-making is to do the least invasive thing that does the most good for the kids; and sometimes the least invasive thing that does the most good for the kids is a [appointed] Board of Managers.” 

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