Texas Senate approves ending STAAR test, sends bill back to House for approval
House Bill 4 will now head back to its originating chamber for final approval before going to the Governor's desk.
The Senate's version of the bill, authored by State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R – Houston, would prohibit school districts from suing the state to block the A-F accountability ratings in which schools are evaluated. In 2023, more than 100 school districts sued the Texas Education Agency to stop the release of the ratings over anticipated changes in how the scores would be calculated.
The bill would also authorize state interventions in school districts that do not comply with the accountability statutes. 'What gets measured gets fixed, but you can't fix what you can't measure,' Bettencourt said in a news release. 'HB 4 ensures accountability ratings are released clearly, fairly, and with purpose to measure performance, report results and help schools improve.'
One of the biggest elements of the bill is ending the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR test. There have been complaints on both sides of the aisle that the STAAR test is forcing schools to teach kids for the test and not teaching them the curriculum, on top of creating high anxiety on students taking the exam.
Instead, schools would switch to a three-test model that is spaced throughout the year. Students would take a national norm-referenced assessment at the beginning of the year, middle of the year, and the end of the year. It will give teachers immediate results on testing to see how students are progressing throughout the year.
The current STAAR testing model does not provide testing results until the summer when students are out of school away from their teachers. Educators have complained the results come too late to help a student improve while they are in the classroom.
Unlike the version the House passed earlier this month, the Senate's version would eliminate the STAAR test in the upcoming 2025-2026 school year. The STAAR elimination and replacement would be phased-in over the next three years, giving time to run pilot programs and train teachers.
The House will have to approve the changes before it can go to the Governor's desk for signature. Sen. Bettencourt was asked if the House members who worked on the original bill were happy with the changes. Bettencourt said they like the new version.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
San Francisco Chronicle
23 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Independent candidate for Michigan governor is betting on partisan fatigue in the midterms
DETROIT (AP) — Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan spent his political career as a Democrat, leading Michigan's largest Democratic stronghold. But now, he's become a target of his former party, whose leaders are furious about his decision to run for Michigan governor next year as an independent. Detroit is a power base for Democrats in the battleground state, and some fear Duggan will draw support from their nominee and potentially help the Republican candidate. Democrats have launched attacks against Duggan, accusing him of being bankrolled by allies of President Donald Trump. But Duggan — who is soon leaving the office he has held since 2014 — says voters of all leanings are tired of partisan fighting. 'It doesn't actually matter where I go in the state,' Duggan said. 'People are angry that their problems are not getting solved because the two parties are so consumed with fighting with each other.' Duggan had been a major Democratic figure in Michigan with a close working relationship with former President Joe Biden. While there is precedent for independent governors in the U.S., none are currently in office and there has never been one in Michigan. Why run as an independent? He announced his bid a month after Democrats suffered heavy losses in the 2024 election. But, midterm elections tend to favor the party not in power. Democrats have now seized on cuts to Medicaid and SNAP benefits as winning issues in races across the country. Duggan doesn't see it that way. 'I mean, it would have been easier to win as a Democrat, but then I'd have just been part of the partisan problem,' Duggan said. As an example, Duggan pointed to Michigan's split Legislature, with Republicans in control of the state House and Democrats controlling the state Senate. Only six proposals have become law this year, and the state operating budget is still hung up. Duggan's campaign has focused on his independency from both parties and education in the state. Duggan derided Michigan House Democrats who voted against a measure to restrict cellphone usage in schools. 'I don't really intend to get involved in the national Republican versus Democratic talking points,' he said. Tariffs in Detroit, and abroad Several companies in Michigan's auto industry, centered in Detroit, have reported major losses and expressed worry about tariffs imposed by the Trump administration. Auto parts often move across the border between the U.S. and Canada multiple times during manufacturing. Duggan said tariffs on China and Mexico could push manufacturing to Michigan. However, tariffs on Canada are 'devastating,' he said. 'When you put a tariff on Canada, you put a tariff on Michigan,' he said. He also critiqued the ever-changing nature of Trump's tariff policies, saying they prevent companies from making educated, long-term investments. President Trump Duggan praised current Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for her work with the Trump administration, opposing the tariffs on Canada and working with him to get new fighter jets for an air force base. Some Democrats have criticized Whitmer for appearing with Trump multiple times this year. 'I think it's exactly the right kind of approach,' he said. Elon Musk Democrats in Michigan have frequently tied Duggan to Elon Musk; an attempt to undercut Duggan by association with the divisive public figure. Musk, a former Trump ally, said in July that he would create a third political party. When Duggan responded to Musk on X saying 'Now you've got my attention,' the Michigan Democratic Party said the mayor was 'cozying' up to the richest man in the world. When asked about exchange, Duggan said his bid is 'exactly the opposite' of a third party and said he wants no part of one. As an independent, he would not be responsible for any party majority, he said. 'I'm going to work with whoever wins to build bridges,' he said. Arab American voters Michigan is home to one of the largest populations of Arab American voters in the U.S., many of whom are disillusioned with both political parties over Israel's military offensive in Gaza which has resulted in a devastating humanitarian crisis. 'The governor doesn't make policy 6,000 miles away,' Duggan said. 'The governor has a great deal to say about the tone of hate speech and threats to individuals — whether it's the Jewish community, the Arab community — in the state of Michigan.' Who else is in the race? Whitmer is term-limited and cannot run for reelection. The crowded field vying to replace her includes three Democrats — Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II and Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson — and four Republicans — U.S. Rep. John James, state Senate Leader Aric Nesbitt, former state Attorney General Mike Cox and former Speaker of the state House Tom Leonard. Running as an independent allowed Duggan to avoid the Democratic primary, but he gave up access to the party's resources. He's well-known in Detroit and the surrounding areas but largely lacks statewide name recognition. Recent fundraising numbers showed Duggan was competitive with Benson, James and Nesbitt. Only Benson's campaign raised more than Duggan's, thanks to $1.1 million she transferred from her Secretary of State campaign account. National Democratic groups, though, are certain to prioritize the Michigan race and pour money in if needed. 'A lot of people in the state are fed up with a two party system,' Duggan said. 'And it's not going to change by electing another Republican or Democrat.'
Los Angeles Times
23 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Millions of Californians may lose health coverage because of new Medicaid work requirements
The nation's first mandated work requirement for Medicaid recepients, approved by the Republican-led Congress and signed by President Trump, is expected to have a seismic effect in California. One estimate from state health officials suggests that as many as 3.4 million people could lose their insurance through what Gov. Gavin Newsom calls the 'labyrinth of manual verification,' which involves Medi-Cal recipients proving every six months that they are working, going to school or volunteering at least 80 hours per month. 'It's going to be much harder to stay insured,' said Martha Santana-Chin, the head of L.A. Care Health Plan, a publicly operated health plan that serves about 2.3 million Medi-Cal patients in Los Angeles County. She said that as many as 1 million people, or about 20% to 40% of its members, could lose their coverage. The work requirement will be the first imposed nationwide in the six-decade history of Medicaid, the program that provides free and subsidized health insurance to disabled and low-income Americans. It's relatively uncharted territory, and it's not yet clear how the rules will shake out for the 5.1 million people in California who will be required to prove that they are working in order to qualify for Medi-Cal, the state's version of Medicaid. After the 2026 midterm elections, millions of healthy adults will be required to prove every six months that they meet the work requirement in order to qualify for Medicaid. The new mandate spells out some exceptions, including for people who are pregnant, in addiction treatment or caring for children under age 14. Democrats have long argued that work requirements generally lead to eligible people l osing their health insurance due to bureaucratic hurdles. Republicans say that a work requirement will encourage healthy people to get jobs and preserve Medicaid for those who truly need it. 'If you clean that up and shore it up, you save a lot of money,' said House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana. 'And you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day.' Only three U.S. states have tried to implement work requirements for Medicaid recipients: New Hampshire, Arkansas and Georgia. One study found that in the first three months of the Arkansas program, more than 18,000 people lost health coverage. People can lose coverage a variety of ways, said Joan Alker, a Georgetown University professor who studies Medicaid. Some people hear that the rules have changed and assume they are no longer eligible. Others struggle to prove their eligibility because their income fluctuates, they are paid in cash or their jobs don't keep good payroll records. Some have problems with the technology or forms, she said, and others don't appeal their rejections. Of the 15 million people on Medi-Cal in California, about one-third will be required to prove they are working, the state said. Those people earn very little: less than $21,000 for a single person and less than $43,000 for a household of four. The state's estimate of 3.4 million people losing coverage is a projection based on what happened in Arkansas and New Hampshire. But those programs were brief, overturned by the courts and weren't 'a coordinated effort among the states to figure out what the best practices are,' said Ryan Long, the director of congressional relations at the Paragon Health Institute, a conservative think tank that has become influential among congressional Republicans. Long said advancements in technology and a national emphasis on work requirements should make work verification less of a barrier. The budget bill includes $200 million in grants for states to update their systems to prepare, he said. Arguments from liberal groups that people will lose healthcare are a 'straw man argument,' Long said: 'They know that the public supports work requirements for these benefits, so they can't come out and say, 'We don't support them.'' A poll by the health research group KFF found this year that 62% of American adults support tying Medicaid eligibility to work requirements. The poll also found that support for the policy drops to less than 1 in 3 people when respondents hear 'that most people on Medicaid are already working and many would risk losing coverage because of the burden of proving eligibility through paperwork.' In June, Newsom warned that some Californians could be forced to fill out 36 pages of paperwork to keep their insurance, showing reporters an image of a stack of forms with teal and gold accents that he described as 'an actual PDF example of the paperwork that people will have to submit to for their eligibility checks.' Many Californians already are required to fill out that 36-page form or its online equivalent to enroll in Medi-Cal and Covered California, the state's health insurance marketplace. Experts say it's too soon to say what system will be used for people to prove their work eligibility, because federal guidance won't be finalized for months. Newsom's office directed questions to the Department of Health Care Services, which runs Medi-Cal. A spokesperson there said officials are 'still reviewing the full operational impacts' of the work requirements. 'The idea that you are going to get a paper submission every six months, I'm not sure people have to do that,' Long said. Georgia is the only state that has implemented a lasting work requirement for Medicaid. Two years ago, the state made healthcare available to people who were working at least 80 hours per month and earned less than the federal poverty limit (about $15,000 for one person or $31,200 for a household of four). More than 100,000 people have applied for coverage since the program's launch in July of 2023. As of June of this year, more than 8,000 people were enrolled, according to the state's most recent data. The Medicaid program has cost more than $100 million so far, and of that, $26 million was spent on health benefits and more than $20 million was allocated to marketing contracts, KFF Health News reported. Democrats in Georgia have sought an investigation into the program. The Inland Empire agency that provides Medi-Cal coverage for about 1.5 million people in San Bernardino and Riverside counties estimated that 150,000 members could lose their insurance as a result of work requirements. Jarrod McNaughton, the chief executive of the Inland Empire Health Plan, said that California's 58 counties, which administer Medi-Cal, 'will be the ones at the precipice of piecing this together' but haven't yet received guidance on how the eligibility process will be set up or what information people will have to provide. Will it be done online? Will recipients be required to fill out a piece of paper that needs to be mailed in or dropped off? 'We don't really know the process yet, because all of this is so new,' Naughton said. In the meantime, he said, the health plan's foundation is working to make this 'as least burdensome as possible,' working to improve community outreach and connect people who receive Medi-Cal insurance to volunteer opportunities.
The Hill
23 minutes ago
- The Hill
Senators pitch $1.5 trillion investment fund for Social Security: What to know
A bipartisan duo in the Senate has been garnering attention for a pitch aimed at shoring up the solvency of Social Security. The idea, pushed by Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.), calls for investing $1.5 trillion over the next five years into an investment fund that would then be given 70 years to grow. 'It is something to save Social Security and to save the benefits flowing to the people, frankly, will either already depend on them or will depend upon them going forward,' Cassidy told The Hill last month. Here's what lawmakers – and some experts – have said so far. How it works While the senators have yet to release text for the plan, Cassidy said the government would create an investment fund separate from the existing Social Security trust funds, into which the government would place $300 billion annually over the next five years. That money would be invested into stocks, bonds and other investments, and Cassidy said it would be held 'in escrow for 70 years.' 'Any dividends being paid, for example, flow back into the investment fund. As that occurs, we also repeal the law requiring that benefits be cut to match income,' Cassidy told The Hill. The Treasury Department would be responsible for making up the payments for those 75 years, at which point the fund would pay back the Treasury Department and use its remaining funds to supplement Social Security payments, according to the senators. Cassidy argued the plan would not add to the national debt, which currently stands at well over $30 trillion. 'The reason is that if you have money in an escrow account, you could always just empty the escrow account and pay off the Treasuries required to do the initial funding,' he said. 'And so, even though we're borrowing that money, it does not increase our nation's indebtedness and the investment income will exceed the interest that accumulates on the money borrowed.' Cassidy estimated the plan could 'generate at least 70 percent of the borrowing required to pay the benefits over the next seven decades.' What are the next steps? The senators have said they're still collecting input on their plan, but the pitch is similar to a previous effort headed up by Cassidy that involved a coalition of senators from both sides of the aisle. 'In a previous Congress, we had seven Republicans and seven Democrats. We're putting that coalition back together,' Cassidy said. As the senators continue to 'socialize' the idea, Cassidy said there's more than a handful of Republicans that have said 'they will openly support or they look forward to supporting, but they just plan to learn a little bit more.' 'We really felt like we have to socialize the idea more before we get down to legislative draftsmanship,' Kaine also said of the idea, noting they've been hearing feedback from some experts. 'I think that if I had to summarize feedback, it would be this can be a really important part of our solution,' Kaine told The Hill. 'It probably is not the entire solution, which we know.' Kaine said turning around a projected shortfall for the program in the next decade will likely 'take a bunch of different things,' but said the plan 'can be a really important ingredient that nobody was really thinking about.' 'And then that makes the path towards solvency a little bit easier,' he added, suggesting the 'novel' idea being explored by him and Cassidy could mean Congress doesn't have to look to more 'painful' options to extend the lifetime of the program. The criticisms While the senators have drawn support over the bipartisan effort and for bringing more attention to the subject, some experts have raised questions over the pitch. In a collection of some reactions from retirement experts published by the Briefing Book last month, voices from prominent think-tanks American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Brookings Institution weighed in on the plan. 'Senators Bill Cassidy and Tim Kaine deserve praise for drawing public attention to Social Security's funding shortfall,' Sita Nataraj Slavov, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) who focuses on public finance and the economics of aging, said as part of the piece. 'Unfortunately, their proposal does not improve the program's finances because it avoids imposing the tax increases or benefit reductions that are necessary to keep it solvent.' Gopi Shah Goda, director of the Retirement Security Project and a senior fellow at Brookings, also said in the piece that borrowing funds as suggested in the senators' plan 'would likely raise interest rates and slow growth, and avoids the difficult but important work of modernizing the program so that it can continue to provide important protection to seniors in a sustainable manner.' In an interview on Tuesday, Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the AEI focused on Social Security reform, compared the idea to a 'pension obligation fund' seen in some states. 'The only thing that has to happen for this to lose money is for stocks to earn a lower return than bonds,' he said. 'States that have tried these pension obligation bonds, some of them come out ahead. Some have lost money,' he said. 'It's a risky proposition. Social Security's go-broke date In their annual report released in June, a board of trustees of the program's accounts found that the combined trust funds for Social Security are projected to run out in 2034. The report projected that the program's Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) fund would be able to cover '100 percent of total scheduled benefits until 2033,' while the Disability Insurance (DI) trust fund is estimated to be able to pay '100 percent of total scheduled benefits through at least 2099.' But when the projections are combined, the resulting fund is estimated to only be able to cover '100 percent of total scheduled benefits until 2034, one year earlier than reported last year. The report cited last year's passage of legislation repealing two key tax rules as a key factor behind the timeline shift, projecting the law would lead to increased benefit levels for some workers. However, that timeline could get even tighter after the recent passage of Trump's 'big, beautiful bill.' The Trump administration's chief actuary for the program released an estimate this week projecting the trust funds will begin to see lower levels of tax revenue of Social Security benefits starting this year. With the recent tax changes, the Office of the Chief Actuary at the Social Security Administration projected depletion of the combined OASI and DI trust funds will accelerate from 'the third quarter of 2034' under the recent board of trustees' report baseline to 'the first quarter of 2034 following implementation of the law.' What are the chances of Social Security action this Congress? While there's support on both sides of the aisle for ways to shore up solvency for the program, changes to the program or how it's funded is a heavy lift in Congress. Cassidy, who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, said he's spoken to the chairman about a potential hearing on the legislation. Others are hopeful of further action on Social Security. 'We all want to do something about it before the deadline,' Sen. Angus King (I-Vt.) said when asked about the plan, but added it 'would be ahistorical' to see action to help shore up solvency for the program in this Congress. 'The last time, when Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan fixed it, my understanding is they were about six months from insolvency. So, maybe we are going to have to wait that long, but I hope not,' King said, noting 'the longer we wait, the harder it is to fix.' 'I'm hoping that we can. As I say, there are a number of different discussions going on,' said King, who previously headed up the bipartisan effort with Cassidy in 2023. While King said he is 'not involved at this point,' he added that he is 'listening and there are several groups that are talking about Social Security.' 'Everything is difficult in every Congress, it seems especially difficult these days. And the closer we get to an election, the less results I think we get,' Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) also said last week. 'But there is a certain demand for efforts to make sure that Social Security is solvent today and in the future.' 'But they will be hard to come by,' he added.
