Remote students can skip STAAR
Standardized tests still required for those attending on campus
Students attending schools remotely will not have to take the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, commonly known as the STAAR test, when it is administered on campuses, Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath said Thursday.
In a livestreamed interview with the Texas Tribune, Morath said schools will be able to make a “variety of adjustments” for students whose families are concerned about the health implications of sending them onto campuses to take the STAAR test in person.
“It’s not opting out of the STAAR test — it’s opting for remote instruction,” Morath said. “They will continue to experience remote instruction, but we don’t have the capability to do the test remotely, so they won’t sit for the STAAR exam.”
Morath said the Texas Education Agency still will require schools to administer the test for students learning in person to see where they are this year following the academic disruptions forced by the coronavirus pandemic. He said parents who keep their children working remotely during STAAR testing will lose access to that assessment and will not have as much information about their academic performances.
“It is because in a time of crisis we have to use every tool at our disposal, which includes, in some cases, objective third-party assessments,” Morath said. “If we don’t know where they are, how do we know how to support them?”
The TEA last October estimated that a little more than 45 percent of students across the state were learning remotely. Trends among districts in Greater Houston show more and more parents have elected to send their students back for in-person instruction each grading period. Among about a dozen local districts that responded to a Houston Chronicle survey in January, between 7 and 54.4 percent of their students were learning virtually.
A TEA study shows local school districts are “relatively close” to having the tools they need to start giving the STAAR tests online to the vast majority of students by 202223, thanks in part to the purchase of 2.5 million computer devices during the pandemic. A 2019 law requires the TEA to create a plan for moving the standardized tests online in the next two years.
While computer-based testing remains in the planning phases, TEA officials announced last year that students in grades three through eight — including those in online-only courses — will not be held back or face any punishments due to their STAAR test performance this school year.
Graduation exams?
Morath’s comments Thursday clarified whether remote students in younger grades would be forced to come to schools to take the test, but TEA officials reiterated Thursday that high school students still are required to take their end-ofcourse exams in person to graduate.
Texas law requires high schoolers to pass state-issued course exams to graduate, but school-based individual graduation committees still have the authority to clear a student for graduation even if they failed or did not take those tests. Gov. Greg Abbott or the Texas Legislature could also make accommodations for those rules in the coming months if they desired.
State Rep. Diego Bernal, D-San Antonio, filed House Bill 999 in January that would enable high school seniors to graduate without taking end-of-course exams this year. He also drafted a letter to the TEA this week, signed by a bipartisan group of representatives, asking that it cancel the STAAR test altogether or at least create a formal opt-out process for parents who do not want their students to be tested this school year.
He said a universal opt-out process would have been more fair to students who have returned to school campuses and still will be required to take the test, unlike their remote-learning peers.
Neither Morath nor TEA officials clarified whether in-person students who stayed home on STAAR testing days would be required to take the assessment on test makeup days.
“If you told parents one of the features of your student going back to school is that they would have to sit for the STAAR exam, they may have kept their kid home,” Bernal said. “That’s why we wanted the universal opt-out — not just for remote learners. Not everyone should have to take the test, especially if it doesn’t count this year.”
He and some education leaders questioned Morath’s assertion that the STAAR test will provide a detailed window to see where students are academically.
HD Chambers, superintendent of Alief ISD in southwest Houston, said his teachers have been giving students benchmark and diagnostic assessments since they returned in fall and already know where they are lagging and what areas need to be addressed.
He said he worries about false comparisons with the 2019 STAAR results, which were taken when all kids were learning in classrooms without the stress of a global pandemic.
“One thing becoming crystal clear to me is that the overreliance on a standardized test is being exposed, because now we’re trying to figure out a way to identify or measure the losses in our children, and all we seem to be thinking about is one test,” Chambers said. “If the data were to be specifically given back to the teacher and parent and said, ‘OK, HD is now two grade levels behind,’ that would be helpful. But the issue is, we already know that about that specific student.”
Texas State Teachers Association spokesman Clay Robison said the TEA should scrap the entire STAAR testing regimen this year.
“What is the point of having the test?” he said. “This test is not going to give an accurate measurement of learning loss among students, but it will waste time, and it will put some kids at risk whose families decide to send them to campus to take it.”
Relieved caregivers
Some parents and caregivers, such as Janetta Rodriguez, were pleased with Thursday’s announcement.
Her 13-year-old grandson has stayed home all school year because she and his mother have autoimmune conditions that make them more vulnerable to COVID-19. She said she had begun to look for ways to opt him out of the STAAR exam before Morath clarified on Thursday that he could stay home instead.
“I was not looking forward to it. I didn’t know how we’d handle it if he would have to go up to the school and be around other kids and how crowded is it going to be,” Rodriguez said. “I was concerned about the amount of people he would be subjected to, so I think it’s great that he doesn’t have to go.”