Texas has wasted millions of dollars on the now outdated State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR).  It’s just too much testing, too time consuming, not significantly improving academic achievement, and unfairly rates schools.  It is time to relieve the public schools of this bureaucratic nightmare and move to something different.  The money would be much better spent by allocating a small fraction of this money to each school to choose its own assessment instrument from an approved list.  The state (but preferably local governments), will continue to set the key target expectations for student academic achievement necessary to retain government funding, but should delegate the task of “just in time assessments” to local communities and their schools to gauge progress toward key Elementary, Middle, and High School graduation targets.   Student educational profiles and needs are dramatically different in communities across the state.  Trust the local citizens and school providers to determine what it believes are important milestones for its school age students to achieve, and to select an adaptive measurement to gauge real time results against those targets.  The College Board SAT, ACT, AP, CLEP and DSST exams are reasonable measures to be used for determining college readiness.  We already have these.  Adding STAAR on top was overkill.