The Texas Education Agency (TEA) granted provisional approval to NWEA's MAP Growth and MAP Reading Fluency assessments for Texas public school districts starting in the 2027–28 school year. The decision covers beginning-of-year and middle-of-year testing under House Bill 8 and K–3 foundational literacy and numeracy screening under House Bill 2. The provisional status applies to the 2027–28 and 2028–29 school years, subject to state requirements for continued approval.
What Happened
Under TEA's Commissioner's List of Approved Alternative BOY and MOY Assessments, Texas school systems can pick state-approved commercial tests for fall beginning-of-year (BOY) and winter middle-of-year (MOY) assessments under House Bill 8. According to NWEA's announcement, MAP Growth received provisional HB 8 approval across four subject areas: math in grades 3–5 (English and Spanish), grades 6–8, and Algebra I; reading language arts (RLA) in grades 3–8 and English I; Spanish RLA in grades 3–5; and elementary science, middle school science, and Biology.
Separately, TEA's House Bill 2 implementation notice established lists of provisionally approved K–3 foundational literacy and numeracy instruments under Texas Education Code §28.0063(a). For those early grades, TEA provisionally approved NWEA's MAP Reading Fluency in English for K–3 foundational literacy and MAP Growth Math in both English and Spanish for K–3 foundational numeracy. State reviewers evaluated the assessments on alignment with the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), early literacy and dyslexia requirements, and Spanish-language availability.
Because the approvals are provisional for up to two school years and require ongoing compliance with state alignment, data, and validation standards, both TEA's HB 8 assessment list and TEA's HB 2 guidance advise school districts not to sign vendor contracts that run past the 2028–29 school year. The agency also recommends including contract termination clauses in case an assessment loses state approval.
The Bigger Picture
Passed by the Texas Legislature in September 2025, House Bill 8 replaces the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) program with the Student Success Tool (SST) starting in the 2027–28 school year. The through-year model uses computer-adaptive BOY and MOY tests. Because these tests adjust question difficulty to student responses, they take less time and use fewer questions. The law also eliminates optional STAAR Interim Assessments and discourages extra benchmark testing to protect classroom instruction time.
Alongside the testing overhaul, Texas enacted House Bill 2, an $8.5 billion public education funding package for early childhood learning, teacher pay, and special education. Most of the funding law took effect in September 2025, but TEA's K–3 assessment requirements under HB 2 begin in the 2027–28 school year. Other vendors have also qualified under the state rules. As we previously reported, TEA granted conditional approval to Renaissance Star Reading and Star Math for K–3 screening under HB 2 and grades 3–8 interim testing under HB 8.
In its announcement, NWEA stated that MAP Reading Fluency uses speech recognition technology to measure oral reading fluency and decoding across a whole classroom at once, rather than through one-on-one testing. Independent research shows mixed results for automated speech recognition (ASR) in reading assessments depending on student age. A 2012 validation study in Educational and Psychological Measurement evaluated the VersaReader ASR system on adult oral reading and found machine scores nearly identical to human raters without demographic bias. A 2025 validation study in the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education evaluated 653 Dutch second- and third-graders. It found that while ASR measures decoding accuracy, speed, and automaticity in primary grades, developers still need better error handling and prosody analysis to build a complete fluency tool. Neither study evaluated simultaneous whole-classroom testing.