Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently signed into law a universal education savings account program, breaking through years of legislative resistance. As the largest “day one” school choice program in the U.S., it marks a watershed victory for supporters—not just in the Lone Star State, but across the country. Yet even as Texas opens new doors for families, it may soon shut an important window into school quality. Lawmakers are locked in deliberations over House Bill 4, a proposal to eliminate the STAAR exam as currently administered. The bill has cleared both chambers in different forms, setting up a high-stakes negotiation that could reshape the state’s approach to accountability.
House Bill 4 would replace STAAR—now a summative end-of-year assessment—with a model that tests kids in smaller segments throughout the school year. Notably, that shift entails moving away from criterion-referenced testing—which measures whether students meet specific grade-level standards—and toward norm-referenced testing, which evaluates students based on how they perform compared to their peers nationwide.
It also takes aim at the state’s A–F accountability system, introducing additional metrics—such as student participation in extracurricular activities—while requiring the Texas Education Agency to obtain legislative approval for all major changes to the ratings system. Importantly, HB 4 expands the use of locally chosen tests and other indicators for a portion of a district’s accountability rating. While such local indicators are meant to supplement—not replace—state-required assessments, the shift risks undermining equity and comparability across Texas as well as weakening the public’s ability to discern whether students are truly meeting grade-level expectations.
Taken together, the ESA win and the proposed testing overhaul reflect a growing sentiment that, because private schools receiving public funds aren’t subject to state testing, traditional public schools shouldn’t be either. Under Texas’s new law, ESA-participating schools will be required to administer a nationally norm-referenced test of their own choosing rather than the state exam. This prompted the claim that public schools deserve comparable flexibility.
The sequencing wasn’t accidental. Lawmakers couldn’t credibly revisit the long-standing architecture of standardized testing until a private school choice program was in place. While the push to reconsider STAAR may have been a logical consequence of how the ESA law was constructed, it also created a political opening. HB 4 wouldn’t eliminate testing outright, but it could set the stage for further erosion. Once annual exams lose their primacy, it’s easy to imagine the next phase—one where districts seek equal treatment with private schools and find a sympathetic audience in the legislature.
Anti-testers on the right
Once the domain of teachers’ unions and the political left, testing skepticism can now be found on the right—yet another example of the horseshoe theory of American politics. For the most ardent school choice proponents, statewide testing regimes are seen less as tools for transparency and more as barriers to innovation. It was only a matter of time before the two issues collided in full.
To be sure, most school choice programs come with some testing provisions, just not the state-mandated variety—an arrangement that many choice advocates view as a feature, not a flaw. If private schools can choose their own assessments, the argument goes, why shouldn’t public schools be granted the same flexibility?
That question spotlights the evolving relationship between two longstanding pillars of reform: school choice and test-based accountability. Though often cast in tension—especially as private schools receiving public funds sidestep state exams—the two approaches have historically been complementary. Transparent data has helped parents make informed choices, while the pressure of choice has, in turn, spurred public schools to improve. But as choice programs expand and skepticism toward standardized tests grows, the balance is tilting. A 2018 AEI paper by Mike McShane, Patrick Wolf, and Collin Hitt anticipated this moment early on:
A growing number of studies are finding that school choice programs can improve high school graduation rates, college attendance, and earnings—without producing gains in test scores. Conversely, studies of other school choice programs have found large short-term test score gains but no lasting benefits in terms of graduation rates or college attainment. Improving test scores appears to be neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for improving the later-life outcomes that truly matter.
In this view, short-term metrics like annual tests offer only a narrow snapshot of what matters, eliding, according to the authors, more important long-run outcomes like high school graduation, college attendance, or parent satisfaction. That seems to be the direction in Texas, where momentum is shifting—not just toward family-defined success, but also in response to the steady resistance to standardized testing that’s long simmered in education circles.
The federal backstop
House Bill 4 also gestures at a broader reorientation of the center of gravity when it comes to federal-state relations in education. One underappreciated provision in the bill would tie Texas’s commitment to annual testing to federal law. If Congress or the U.S. Department of Education were to relax existing testing mandates, the state would automatically follow suit—potentially eliminating annual testing altogether. The provision functions like a “trigger law”: if federal requirements disappear, so does the state’s. Without those federal guardrails, there’s little to stop abrupt policy changes that undermine comparability, consistency, and public understanding.
As Texas policymakers consider HB 4, the path forward demands careful calibration. It is entirely reasonable to want more useful, instructionally relevant assessments (though that’s not the proper role for state achievement tests). It also makes sense to expect that all publicly funded schools—regardless of governance model—be held to some common standards. For private schools receiving partial public funding, a sliding scale of accountability may be more appropriate. The challenge lies in designing a system that fosters innovation without erasing the public’s ability to judge results.
Abbott and his allies deserve credit for their long-fought ESA victory. But it should not become the pretext for permanently lowering expectations or obscuring outcomes in the public system. Especially in the wake of pandemic-era learning loss, the need for honest information about student achievement has never been greater. Without it, the very families empowered by choice may be left in the dark about whether their children are being well served.
Update (June 2025): House Bill 4 ultimately died after the Texas House and Senate couldn’t reach a compromise—ending this round of the school choice vs. state testing standoff in a draw. The Senate aimed to preserve STAAR under a new name and keep oversight with the Texas Education Agency, while the House pushed to replace it with a nationally norm-referenced test. Neither side yielded, and the impasse sank the legislation. For accountability advocates, it’s a partial victory: a flawed bill was defeated, and the A–F rating system remains intact. However, the Senate’s bill would have curtailed ongoing legal challenges to the A–F system—a key opportunity that was missed. For now, STAAR survives—but the broader fight over assessment and accountability in Texas is far from over.
