By Dale Chu
Don’t look now, but Texas and Oklahoma are turning heads with their latest moves on assessment.
Texas is poised to overhaul its assessment and accountability system—and not all of the changes are for the better. House Bill 4, which has already cleared the Texas House with broad bipartisan support (by a vote of 143-1) and is now under consideration by the Texas Senate, would replace the state’s current STAAR exam with a series of shorter tests given throughout the year. It would also shift authority away from the state education agency and broaden the scope of what counts in school ratings. While some aspects of the bill are well-intentioned, the overall effect could dilute the role of academics, undermine transparency, and open the door to a weaker, less coherent approach to measuring student learning.
Notably, the bill would move Texas away from an objective scale that measures whether students meet grade-level expectations and instead evaluate them based on how they perform relative to their peers nationwide. Supporters argue this offers a more flexible and comparative measure of student progress. But critics rightly point out that it obscures whether students are truly on track. If adopted, Texas could end up telling families their children are doing fine—simply because others are doing worse.
Perhaps most revealing is a clause buried in the bill that effectively ties the state’s commitment to annual testing to federal law. If Congress (or the U.S. Department of Education) were to ease ESSA’s testing requirements, Texas would follow suit by reducing its own:
…if changes to federal law or regulations… reduce the number or frequency of assessment instruments required to be administered to students, the State Board of Education shall adopt rules reducing the number or frequency of assessment instruments required to be administered to students under state law, and the agency shall ensure that students are not required to be assessed in subject areas or in grade levels that are no longer required to meet the minimum requirements of the law.
It’s a clear reminder of how the federal backstop has become the de facto safeguard for statewide assessments. Without it, states like Texas could quickly beat a hasty retreat.
Texas isn’t alone. Just north of the Red River, Oklahoma’s state superintendent recently floated the idea of eliminating state assessments altogether. The suggestion would seem to fly in the face of the state’s pledge to continue its A-F accountability system as part of its waiver request. Nevertheless, the sentiment is telling. The unscientific poll on X showed support for ending state testing winning out, but more importantly, the superintendent’s aspirations for higher office make the Sooner State one to keep an eye on.
These two developments defy the conventional narrative that skepticism toward standardized testing is a blue-state phenomenon. If anything, the moves in Texas and Oklahoma suggest a broader, bipartisan erosion of commitment to academic transparency. At a time when students need more clarity and support than ever, both states could soon adopt policies that blur the very metrics that make improvement possible.