Claudia de Leon describes her son Diego’s kindergarten class at Houston’s Helms Elementary School as “magical.” His teacher taught the students to examine each feature of their faces and then sketch them one by one to create life-like self-portraits. Another teacher played songs on the guitar to aid the kids’ learning. Diego’s next two years at Helms Elementary were filled with similarly joyous hands-on learning in the core subjects. So, in the third grade, when Diego told his mom he didn’t want to go back to school, de Leon assumed he was being bullied.
She later found out Diego, an A and B student, feared he would fail third grade. His teachers had told him that he would be held back if he didn’t pass the state standardized test, known as the STAAR test, and that teachers at the school would receive a poor evaluation and be fired if their students’ scores were low.
That year, 2012, was the first year the STAAR test—formally called the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness—was administered to students as a singular test that was meant to measure what students learned all year in particular core subjects. It was then that de Leon started a campaign for parents in the Houston Independent School District to opt their children out of taking the STAAR test.
