An Open Letter to the Governor Elect – Take Action on Morath’s Accountability Scam
Dear Gov. Elect Hinojosa,
First, thank you for your unequivocal commitment to end the STAAR testing regime that has come to dominate Texas public education. You have rightly recognized that STAAR has become far more than an assessment; its high-stakes consequences distort classroom instruction and place enormous pressure on students, teachers, and neighborhood schools. But even with a Governor committed to change, STAAR cannot disappear overnight. Until the Legislature acts, the existing assessment requirements remain in place, which means Texas children will again sit for STAAR in the spring of 2027. For years, parents who side with your concern over STAAR have taken action by refusing participation in this atrocious assessment. Now, we ask you to take action for them! The question is what your administration and your new Education Commissioner can do immediately to reduce the harm caused by the existing system while the Legislature works toward permanent reform. One important first step is within the Commissioner’s control: recognize parental refusals as a separate category in the Texas accountability system and stop using them to punish public schools.
Today, when a parent refuses STAAR for a child, TEA does not simply report the truth, which is that the student did not take the assessment. Instead, the system assigns the refused assessment the lowest possible scaled score and then uses that artificial result against the school in measuring academic achievement. Yet TEA recognizes the fiction when using that same score would work in the school’s favor. Academic Growth is supposed to measure the change in a student’s actual performance from one year to the next. When a child receives an artificial “zero” because of a refusal and subsequently takes STAAR, TEA does not allow the school to claim spectacular academic growth from that artificial starting point. That makes perfect sense, because the zero never measured what the child knew. But it cannot logically be unreal when it would benefit the school and real when it can be used to punish the school. Texas should not manipulate the meaning of the same data point depending upon which treatment produces the harsher accountability result.
There is a straightforward and honest alternative. The Accountability Manual should recognize Parental Refusal as its own assessment category. TEA should continue to count every eligible student, report every refusal, publish the resulting participation rate, and satisfy every federal reporting and participation requirement. But a parental refusal should not be converted into a fictitious measure of academic performance. ESSA does not prohibit states from recognizing parental opt-out procedures, even though it continues to impose federal participation requirements. And TEA already maintains detailed administrative rules governing which data are included and excluded from accountability calculations, including an entire appendix of the 2026 Accountability Manual addressing the inclusion and exclusion of data. There is nothing deceptive about reporting that 95 percent of students took the test and five percent were parental refusals. To the contrary, that is considerably more honest than reporting those five percent as though they sat for STAAR and demonstrated the lowest possible level of academic achievement.
I therefore urge you to direct your new Commissioner to amend the Accountability Manual before the Spring 2027 administration of STAAR to provide a simple rule: a refused assessment may be counted and publicly reported for participation purposes, but neither the refusal nor any minimum scaled score assigned because of that refusal may ever be used adversely against a school, school district, teacher, or student in the Texas accountability system. Texas can comply with federal participation requirements without inventing an academic failure where no measurement of academic performance ever occurred. Parents who refuse STAAR should own that decision; teachers, principals, school districts, and children should not be punished for it. Until Texas can finally replace STAAR, your administration can at least insist that the State tell the truth about its results: a test that was never taken is not a failed test, and Texas should stop pretending that it is.
