Texas STAAR tests were canceled for many on Tuesday after technical problems

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Texas education officials advised districts to suspend the first day of STAAR tests after thousands of students showed up in person and failed to take the standardized test online due to widespread technical issues statewide.

“Once your students have been given access to the test, they should continue testing. If your students have not had access to the test, they should be rejected from the test until the issue is resolved, ”the Texas Education Agency said.

Texas officials mandated students to take the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness in person at controlled test sites this year, although millions of students are still conducting their studies remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The dropout impacted the districts taking the tests online and ranged from slow response times to students unable to log in to the test. Writing tests for fourth and seventh graders were disrupted, as were English I tests for high school students, TEA said. Online testing will resume on Wednesday.

TEA plans to bring the test fully online by the 2022-23 academic year. For districts that also planned to conduct paper tests with Scantrons, students using those versions could continue testing.

“We understand the frustration this has caused students, parents, teachers and administrators,” said the TEA statement. “What happened today is completely unacceptable.”

The Educational Testing Service, one of the companies contracted by the state to develop and administer the test, is investigating the problem, the TEA report said. STAAR tests usually have a time limit of four or five hours, depending on their subject, and tests are scheduled until May 14. According to TEA’s press release, ETS will no longer run statewide testing services after this spring. Cambium Assessment, another commercially standardized testing company, will take over these tasks from the 2021-22 school year.

“Everyone involved in Texas public education should expect better than what they have experienced today,” announced TEA. “We are working to ensure that our students do not experience future testing problems.”

Dr. Mark Henry, Chief Superintendent of the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, said online testing began statewide before 9 a.m.

Students at Austin ISD waited in person for nearly two hours to take the test. Dick Frazier, a music teacher at Austin ISD, also said there was a shortage of devices in his district for all the students who showed up to take the online test.

“In some cases, these children have never been to our school because they were in the pandemic last year and this year because of the pandemic,” Frazier said.

While the test is required this year, there is no penalty for elementary and high school students who fail to show up or fail the STAAR test this year. Texas officials have said the test would not affect students’ ability to advance to the next grade.

But high school students must pass five subject-specific courses by the time they graduate, a requirement not waived this year. Henry said it was “foolish” to expect students to personally take a high-stakes standardized test this spring, and he attributed the push to run the STAAR this year to the state’s contract with the $ US testing company. 64 million.

“There is a lot of pressure on people to make sure those contracts are executed,” said Henry. So this spring, testing is not about improving academic performance. It is about improving the operating results of a testing company. “

Online STAAR tests have had technical issues before. In 2018, software kicked thousands of students out of the test while it was still in progress and stopped them logging in. In 2016, computer problems statewide affected more than 14,000 tests.

Disclosure: Educational Testing Service is a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a non-profit, non-partisan news organization funded in part by donations from members, foundations, and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters do not play a role in the Tribunes journalism. Find a full list here.