If school districts and teachers had been responsibly requiring students to learn the basics (Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic) to be begin with, Texas wouldn't need a statewide test to assess the educational level of students. And it's the parents' responsibility to enforce student compliance with home assignments. Too many parents think it's the schools' responsibility to educate their children. Wake up! Parents/guardians are still the primary role model/influence in their children's lives. Unfortunately many of them didn't think about that before the children were born.

Umm...Laurie Salazar...the test is STAAR (2 A's)...

we would save millions of dollars, be able to get rid of excessive support staff and finally prove the rhetoric that the students would do better if we simply allowed the teachers to teach is nothing but B.S.

I have an idea, let's make the texas teachers happy and stop all the standardized testing. simply give all seniors in texas the SAT or ACT for free and see what the results are. Betcha they suck.

So let's see STARR stands for Stupid Teachers Against Real Results so they change the test and give a 5 year phased in grace period. Now if a students gets half the questions correct he/she has passed. Welcome to the Texas Educational System

The term "Yellow Journalism" comes to mind after merely reading the title. Noooooooooo. the STAAR results ARE NOT IN! The results will not be released until January 2013. On May 23rd the state released the Raw Scores to the school districts. For example there were 62 questions on the 8th grade reading assessment. Some of those questions were "field questions" which do not count, will not be graded, and furthermore will not configure into the students' final score. This was the case for ALL STAAR assessments. So, lets say a student correctly answered 52 of the 62 questions. It is safe to assume the student passed. But what if the student correctly answered 42 of the 62 questions? It is impossible to say the student passed or failed because we do not know which of the questions were field questions. Those questions were counted for the Raw Score data but will not be counted on the actual results. The reporter of this story would do well to further investigate in the future. School Administrators are better sources to quote than a 15 year old girl who, according to this reporter, thought the test was easier than expected yet she did not find success on the ELA portion of the EOC. Rubbish!