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Identical bills filed in the House and Senate on Monday would scrap the state's long-used standardized test and introduce three shorter tests throughout the school year, with results delivered within 48 hours.

Legislators have a chance this summer to replace the STAAR test. What they come up with will decide the fate of schools like Dobie Middle School, where low test scores have pushed the Austin district to intervene.

The state standardized test has long been criticized for taking instructional time away from teachers and putting unnecessary pressure on students.

Austin ISD students, like kids throughout Texas, are seeing gains in reading proficiency since the COVID-19 pandemic, but math is another story. Educators and policy experts say more resources are needed to help students catch up.

The law requires school districts to automatically enroll fifth graders with high state standardized math test scores in advanced math in middle school. The measure had bipartisan support and sailed through the Texas Legislature.

While Texas students have not regained all the ground they lost in math during the pandemic, scores across all grades were higher in 2022 than they were in 2021. Reading proficiency, on the other hand, appears to have fully recovered.

Austin ISD said students who came to a school building could leave immediately, but encouraged them to stay for regular classes because COVID transmission has been low.

State lawmakers had previously asked the Texas Education Agency to seek a federal waiver to cancel the standardized tests.

Were the reading and writing passages on standardized tests that Texas elementary and middle school students took this spring too challenging for their�

STAAR testing is just about over for this school year. The State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness have been part of Texas students' lives since�