Florida School Boards Association
A fight over standardized testing and school accountability came close to home on Monday, when the Florida Board of Education’s traveled to fertile ground for criticism: Miami-Dade County. At issue during the board’s monthly meeting was the state’s plan to issue school letter grades based on new state tests given in the Spring. School superintendents…
TALLAHASSEE — If parents don’t want their children to take standardized tests, they should send them to private schools, the chair of the House education committee said on Friday. “In public school … you cannot opt out of the tests,” Rep. Marlene O’Toole, a Republican from Lady Lake, told reporters after a committee meeting on…
Florida’s education accountability system has lost credibility among too many Floridians to remain effective as-is, Pasco County schools superintendent Kurt Browning said Friday. Without changes, “I think it’s just going to get worse,” said Browning, the only superintendent to attend the state Senate Education Committee’s Thursday hearing on testing. “Whether real or perceived, school administrators,…
TALLAHASSEE — The Florida Department of Education reviewed two drafts of an ostensibly independent report on the validity of the state’s controversial new exams, and received the final report the night before it was released to the public, a representative of the company that performed the study and state officials said on Thursday. An official…
TALLAHASSEE — A key state senator said Thursday it’s time to stop harping on the problems that arose during state standardized testing earlier this year because there’s little the Legislature can do to fix it now anyway. Sen. John Legg, who chairs the chamber’s pre-kindergarten to 12th grade education committee, said it’s not worth entertaining…
With Florida legislative committees getting started, the state School Boards Association is putting the finishing touches on its legislative priority package for the new session. It’s focusing a lot of its attention on testing and accountability as it presents a proposal to members before formal adoption. Some of the ideas have been talked about before,…
Florida Education Commissioner Pam Stewart called it “welcome news.” County school superintendents say it confirms their worst fears about the botched rollout of the Florida Standards Assessments and suggest the test results are worthless. So you read the following annotated excerpts from the just-released $600,000 study by Alpine Testing Solutions of this year’s FSA and…
In conjunction with the first of three public hearings, the Florida Department of Education has released its educator and reactor panels’ recommended cut scores for the Florida Standards Assessments. The proposal, in a lengthy slide presentation, shows recommendations for math and language arts exams at several grade levels. Generally speaking, if applied the suggested levels…
Florida testing and the use of the results will be front and center Thursday afternoon as the Senate Education Committee holds a 90-minute hearing on the aftermath of HB 7069, the bill adopted last spring to cut back on some (but not all) of the excesses that generated so much criticism over several months. Much…
TAMPA — Robin DeVault’s 15-year-old daughter knew there were problems with the Florida Standards Assessment the second she saw the test. “She was quite upset. She got in the car and said, ‘Mom, that was an epic fail,’” said DeVault, president of the Hillsborough County Council PTA. “You don’t want to hold students and teachers…