On May 11, the Senate passed Senate Bill 149, giving students who failed one or two STAAR tests a chance to still graduate.

The new law requires schools to create Individual Graduation Committees to decide if a student should be able to graduate if they had previously failed one or two of two of the state exams. Students will still have to pass at least three of the State Assessment of Academic Readiness exams and meet some other requirements that the committee is able to consider.

When Gov. Greg Abbott signed the new law easing graduation requirements, it went into effect immediately, giving thousands of seniors across the state who had failed one or two of the exams a chance to walk the graduation stage this year.

For at least four years, students have consistently heard one message from state officials that is no longer true as of the passing of Senate Bill 149: they must pass all five of their end-of-course exams to graduate.

In theory, this is a very sound and solid law. It takes a lot of stress off of the shoulders of students who failed one or two of these exams. No longer will students feel as much pressure walking into a STAAR testing

environment, and that has its benefits. However, we as the Eagle’s Eye editorial board believe that, despite the good nature of the law, it defeats the purpose of the STAAR test entirely, and that creating a system to void two of the tests is arbitrary in that better systems could be put in place.

While Senate Bill 149 was passed with what we assume to be the best of intentions, the major problem with it is that the law seems to put too much work into something that could be solved with much less effort. Having to form committees for each individual student is a lot more effort

than simply just changing the graduation requirements concerning the STAAR test. This would not only be more favorable for students and staff, but might even been more effective in that it will cost significantly less funds, reserving much needed money for more important programs in need of additional funding.

The other most evident issue that we as the editorial board noticed was the evidence leading to the conclusion that Senate Bill 149 was simply just a temporary solution or a way to avoid the problem rather than fix the problem at the source. For a law that’s only going to be in effect for two years, it seems very odd to enact it immediately as a path to a diploma for the estimated 20,600 students who otherwise wouldn’t get the chance to receive it.

Rather than proposing a temporary solution to the issue, state legislature should have looked into ways to make the STAAR easier for students to pass, such as making the courses more student focused. More radically, the state could cut mandated testing from the requirements to graduate, and either use it purely as a source of data or get rid of it entirely, as other states have done in the past.