The Texas Education Agency is due to release the last missing piece of this year’s standardized-test results on Thursday — the grade 5 and grade 8 science scores from the spring STAAR exam — closing out a 2026 results cycle the state broke into stages for the first time. Every other subject on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, the annual test all public-school students take, came out June 16. Science was held back.
The reason is a rewrite of the state’s science standards. The agency updated the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills — the grade-by-grade list of what students are supposed to learn, known as the TEKS — and the redesigned grade 5 and 8 science tests had to clear a step called standard-setting before scores could be reported.
Standard-setting is the process of deciding how many questions a student must answer correctly to count as performing on grade level. TEA said in June it pushed the science release to July 31 so the new material would neither raise nor lower the difficulty of the test, keeping this year’s results a fair measure of what students learned rather than an artifact of a harder or easier exam.
The science numbers carry weight beyond the classroom. They feed the A-F accountability ratings — the letter grades the state assigns to every district and campus each year — that TEA has said are due by Aug. 15 under state law. The Texas Dispatch reported this week that those 2026 ratings are expected in mid-August, the second straight on-time release after litigation over the grading formula froze earlier years.
For districts already under state control or fighting to avoid it, a single weak campus grade can trigger sanctions. Austin ISD on Thursday ended a turnaround partnership covering three struggling middle schools as it works to head off a possible takeover.
The rest of the June results give science a mixed backdrop. Reading held steady or improved across nearly every grade, with eighth-grade reading up three percentage points; Commissioner Mike Morath said the middle-school reading gains “may be associated with” the statewide ban on classroom cellphones enacted under House Bill 1481. Math was uneven. Fourth grade posted the largest gain, four points, while seventh-grade scores fell — a drop the agency attributed to a policy working as designed.
Under a 2023 law, strong elementary math students are automatically moved into advanced courses, so 32 percent of seventh-graders took the harder eighth-grade math test in 2026, up from 16 percent in 2023. Measured by the grade a student is enrolled in rather than the test taken, Morath said, the share meeting grade level rose at every level. Grade 8 social studies climbed to 32 percent meeting grade level from 30 percent.
Science is the only subject still without a 2026 figure, which makes today’s release the first look at how Texas students fared under the revised science standards and the baseline against which future years will be judged. Parents can view individual scores through the Family Portal at TexasAssessment.gov, and district- and campus-level data posts to the Texas Assessment Research Portal.
The science scores land two weeks before the A-F ratings that will fold them in, and just ahead of House Public Education Committee interim hearings scheduled for Aug. 12-13 — the next chance lawmakers will have to press Morath on what this year’s numbers say about whether Texas classrooms are gaining ground.