Florida School Boards Association
The results are in for the end-of-course assessment tests for Florida’s students, and the state’s students have seen a slight drop in some subjects, some have seen slight improvements, and other scores have remained stagnant. The 2014-2015 school year was the first year all of Florida’s students were fully immersed in the state’s newest education…
Earlier this week, Seminole schools superintendent Walt Griffin sent a series of testing recommendations to Florida education commissioner Pam Stewart, including the suggestion that the state scrap its Florida Standards Assessments for a nationally recognized test. FSA administration this spring was plagued with problems, leading to a validity study that’s occurring now. If nothing else,…
The Senate on Tuesday defeated an amendment to the Every Child Achieves Act that would have allowed parents nationwide to opt out of federally-mandated state standardized tests without putting school districts at risk of federal sanctions. The chamber voted 64 to 32 against the amendment, proposed by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) amid a backlash against…
Florida school districts received another round of state test results on Friday, even as an independent contractor reviews the validity of the exams. The state Department of Education publicly released the passing rates for two tests that stand as graduation requirements — Algebra I and 10th-grade language arts — along with individual student information to…
In their effort to tie teachers’ job evaluations to student performance, Florida lawmakers acknowledge they initially went too far. “We were trying to prove a point, and we became overprescriptive,” said Senate Education Committee Chairman John Legg, who began pressing the issue five years ago. This spring, comfortable that the idea of increased accountability for…
Not everything labeled a ‘school voucher’ in the news and on social media is technically a voucher, and it seems every time news breaks about another private school choice law passing or getting challenged in court, the same argument pops up. A recent exchange on Twitter between the Washington Post’s Emma Brown and the Cato…
Have you been wondering how the U.S. Department of Education would respond if a state passed a law that made opting out of state tests easier, both for parents and schools? Oregon may be about to provide a test case. The state’s House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a bill in April that would inform parents…
In its effort to restore some credibility to Florida’s testing system, the Legislature called for a validity study on this spring’s Florida Standards Assessments. One company bid. Alpine Testing Solutions asked for just under $595,000 for the work. Who will cover that price tag? State senators think American Institutes for Reseach, the firm that oversaw the…
Education Week takes a page from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross — who coined the five stages of grief — and outline the emotional stages of Common Core supporters and opponents. The math and language arts standards turn five years old this week. Florida schools are wrapping up the first school year of using their version of Common…
Despite Florida’s testing validity study, schools still need to know which third graders scored lowest on the Florida Standards Assessments language arts exams to help them decide whether the children should move to fourth grade or not. They got the list of students in the lowest 20 percent on Thursday. That’s the level at which…