100 signatures reached
To: Texas Governor Greg Abbott
Waive the STAAR Test for the 2020-21 School Year!
Please waive STAAR testing for all Texas students grades 3-12 during the 2020-21 school year. Our parents, our school administrators, and our communities need to be free to make the best decisions possible for our students' health and safety without undue worry about the impact on test scores.
Why is this important?
The pressure of worrying about the impact of safety measures on potential test scores should not be a factor in making decisions about how and when to protect our kids from COVID-19 (or any transmissible disease). Our only concern should be the health of the students and of the community.
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted classes for the majority of the Spring semester of the 2019-20 school year. Though our teachers, parents, and students worked very hard to implement effective online courses, we anticipate there will be extra work needed to catch students up. That alone will bring added stress to our classrooms in 2020-21, but it may also induce administrators and school board members to take unnecessary risks just to maintain acceptable test scores. That is unacceptable.
However, we still consider it important to know how our students are learning and how much progress they have made. In Spring 2020, when STAAR testing was waived, the state of Texas still offered schools an optional End of Year (EOY) assessment, and will also offer a Beginning of Year (BOY) assessment in the fall. These exams were simply intended to help establish growth and gaps in our students' learning, and carry no penalties.
We ask that the same optional EOY and BOY assessments be offered for the 2020-21 school year so all of us can gauge student progress. However, the STAAR test has no place in Texas schools for the next 12 months, and should be waived immediately.