On September 3, 2025, a bill was passed by the Texas legislature, ushering in a new era of STAAR tests. House Bill 8 requires students to take three different tests throughout the year, rather than just one, and will be introduced in the 2027-2028 school year.
The bill aims to make students more stress-free. Instead of taking one big test, they will have three smaller ones, which will make everything less fraught and demanding in terms of cramming for one big test. Instead of several weeks, test results will be available within 48 hours for students and parents to view. The scores will be formatted as a percentile rank, which shows how students did amongst their classmates. These tests will monitor growth throughout the year instead of just showing our mastery in the subject.
The timeline for the tests would be at the beginning, middle, and end of the school year, which will help the teacher immensely, as they can see what students struggled with on the first test and focus more on those weak subjects for the next test. And since the STAAR test is such a big deal, teachers would take weeks to prepare students for the test, usually reviewing stuff they already learned, which takes up valuable time that could be spent learning new things, but instead, we have to cram and review for a test that doesn’t even do anything for everyone’s actual education.
On average, teachers combined spend about 3,000 hours reviewing for the STAAR. HB 8 will buy back 15 to 30 hours of learning. Teachers may also feel compelled to make students study more because they get paid more based on their performance. The Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA) program rewards high-performing teachers, and classroom observation data allows them to get raises based on how well they are teaching and STAAR results.
Colleges aren’t going to look at our 8th-grade math STAAR test or our 10th-grade English II scores, so there is no point in taking them. In 2023, a Texas Education Poll surveyed people and found that more than half of people think that the STAAR tests are unnecessary and cause extra stress in students’ already stressful lives, and say that the state’s letter grade system accurately reflects their completely flawless quality. We spend most of our school year perfecting our grades, making sure we have high GPAs, so the extra burden of studying for the STAAR makes things a lot more complicated. HB 8 would also make it so you wouldn’t need to pass the English II assessment, which, as of right now, is a graduation requirement.
If students don’t meet the agency’s expected growth on these new assessments, their school districts will get penalized. And for STAAR tests, if you fail a test in grades 3-8, you get accelerated teaching, but once in high school, you need to pass five STAAR-level exams to graduate, which puts way too much pressure on students to pass these tests. HB 8 makes it so that the first two tests only count as growth, while the EOY exam (the last test), you have to pass to graduate, but students will be way more prepared, since they basically had two mock practice tests of the EOY exam, think of it like studying in advance, which all together makes me support HB 8.