July 21, 2016 6:45 PM

KR: Texas appears more ready than ever to dismantle STAAR

Our education reporter writes that Texas appears to be closer than ever to demolishing its ailing assessment system, a strategy strongly supported by a community survey released yesterday.

The results of a State Board of Education-commissioned survey are grim: Better than 60 percent of the 27,200 respondents were in favor of scrapping the STAAR and replacing it with the SAT, ACT or Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Four out of five supported moving students to the next grade, even if they failed STAAR.

Chair Donna Bahorich, who discussed the results at yesterday’s State Board of Education committee session, stopped short of endorsing the results. Instead, Bahorich called the findings “a temperature gauge on the degree of comfort business leaders, teachers, parents and students have on these topics.”

The current degree of comfort with STAAR clearly is “very little.” Almost 90 percent of survey respondents, with the majority being teachers, preferred to reduce the weight of STAAR in teacher evaluations, which is currently 20 percent. And the survey had almost universal support of better ways to test students with disabilities, immediate release of test results and elimination of perceived trick questions.

By Kimberly Reeves