House votes to ease up on new testing and graduation requirements

AUSTIN — The Texas House, responding to pleas from worried school districts, voted Wednesday to ease up on tough new testing and graduation requirements for high school students.
Although critics said the House bill was a major retreat from strengthening academic expectations, most members voted to pass the legislation, which would allow students to fail as many as eight of 12 new end-of-course exams and still earn a diploma. Tentative approval came on a voice vote, with final action scheduled for Thursday.

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Stutz:
AUSTIN – Texas high school students have a year before they must begin to pass a battery of 12 end-of-course tests to graduate, but results for hundreds of thousands of students already taking some of the exams portend a rocky start for the new testing program. Of the nearly 102,000 students who took the Algebra I test in May, for example, just 57 percent met the passing standard on the 50-question exam. Only 12 percent achieved "commended performance" for correctly answering most of the items.
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TEA may suspend 'Texas Projection Measure'

AUSTIN — State Education Commissioner Robert Scott is considering elimination of a policy that allowed hundreds of schools to boost performance ratings last year by factoring in projections of students’ future performance on tets.
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