Judge Gives Go-Ahead to Parents Suing Texas Over Too-Long STAAR Test

Since February, at least, Houston businessman Ben Becker and other parents of Texas K-12 students have been trying to learn how, precisely, the Texas Education Agency was planning to break the law.

That’s a dramatic way to put it, of course, but it’s essentially accurate. A law passed in 2015 mandated that the state’s standardized test, STAAR, must be short enough for elementary school kids to finish in less than two hours, and for middle schoolers to complete under three. The measure was one of a few steps the Legislature has taken in recent years to scale back the state’s test regimen in response to parents’ and educators’ demands.

The law took effect in September 2015, and by then the next STAAR test date was just months away. Shortening or rewriting the test so quickly would have been incredibly expensive, if it could be done at all. Instead, then-Education Commissioner Michael Williams announced that TEA would drop a few “field test” questions that wouldn’t have been scored anyway, and give writing tests in a single four-hour test period, rather than over two days. Those weren’t precise fixes, but Williams said the agency would use the 2015-2016 tests to study shortening the tests for the next school year.

So Becker, who is an advocate for test reform, wanted to see what that study looked like. In February, he began filing public information requests for reports and emails between TEA and its test developer, the New Jersey testing firm Educational Testing Service (ETS), about how long it took students to finish the STAAR. The response, he says, was that there weren’t any, at least not yet. In April he asked again and got the same reply.

Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/staar-test-too-long-lawsuit/