On the other side of the debate are school reformers who contend that tough accountability systems like Staar are a civil rights imperative, and that they protect low-income students and students of color from what President George W. Bush famously called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

The 2018 Staar tests found that 58 percent of Texas third graders are not reading at grade level. On the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, given to a sample of fourth graders across the country, 72 percent of Texas students were not proficient in reading — a fact the state has cited as evidence that tough local standards are warranted.

More than half of the state’s public school students are Hispanic and nearly 60 percent come from low-income families. About a fifth are still learning English.

Texas is, in many ways, the birthplace of the American education reform movement. It was among the first to use student test scores to rate schools. But the state has also been accused, repeatedly, of lowering standards to inflate performance, and has made a concerted effort in recent years to raise them. Now it is being accused of overcorrecting.

“Every parent wants their kid to do better,” said Jeff Cottrill, deputy commissioner of the Texas Education Agency. “When you hear maybe it’s the test’s fault, it makes you feel a little bit better.”

But Mr. Cottrill defended the Staar exams, and warned against a false sense of complacency. Any attack on standardized testing, he said, “has the ability to destabilize high expectations for students.”

One Reading Test, Two Scores

Kristen took the Staar last spring, when she was in third grade. Her parents, who live in this working-class suburb east of Dallas, were later told in a report that their daughter was “approaching” grade level in reading, like a third of Texas third graders who took the test — some 128,000 students.

