Opinion
April 25, 2023
How Texas’s STAAR Test Took Over Public School Culture
Months-long preparations, complete with celebrity guests, pep rallies, and theme days, have turned a standardized test into an anxiety-ridden circus for kids.
Testing
Politics & Policy
May 4, 2019
More STAAR? The Texas Senate Proposes Even Higher-Stakes Testing for Students.
On Monday, the Senate passed a proposal to add four more writing tests and tie school funding directly to third-grade test results.
Politics & Policy
April 1, 2019
State Senator José Menéndez: The STAAR Test Is Hurting Our Kids. We Need to Act Now.
An op-ed from the San Antonio senator and member of the Texas Senate Committee on Higher Education.
News & Politics
March 25, 2019
New Study Reaffirms That STAAR Reading Tests Are Not on Grade Level
Eight different readability formulas showed the test's reading portions are at a higher level of difficulty than appropriate for the grades they’re assessing.
Politics & Policy
March 13, 2019
Testing the Test: New Legislation Filed to Audit STAAR
More challenges emerge to Texas’s least favorite exam.
News & Politics
February 20, 2019
Are Texas Kids Failing? Or Are the Tests Rigged?
Leading educators and testing experts have studied the exams and find that they are asking kids to understand passages aimed two or more years above their grade level.
Politics & Policy
March 26, 2013
The Future of Public Ed (Begins in About Five Minutes)
The House will take up HB 5 on the floor today and will debate whether the measure is sufficiently rigorous to achieve college readiness.
January 21, 2013
Are You Smarter than a High School Student?
Test your smarts with 15 sample questions from the new STAAR subject matter tests.
News & Politics
January 20, 2013
The Exonerated
Thirty-seven men, 525 years behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit. Thanks to DNA testing, their claims of innocence have finally been proved—but what happens to them now?
February 15, 2012
Tweaks to STAAR Exam Rollout
State senator Florence Shapiro says that the Texas Education Agency can (and should) waive the requirement that tests count toward fifteen percent of final grades this year.
The Stand Up Desk
January 1, 1997
Testy Mail
IN NOVEMBER WE PUBLISHED A RANKING of 3,172 public grade schools in Texas, giving each school one of five grades, from four stars (the best) to no stars (the worst). This article provoked an unusual amount of mail. Some of the letters were barely restrained victory whoops from people connected
News & Politics
April 1, 1992
Testing Delusions
This year is the twenty-sixth anniversary of the hardest test I ever took. Then, about to graduate from college with an English degree, I had been in school for so long and had liked it so much that I had no particular yearning to go out into the world. Perhaps