Florida School Boards Association
A committee designed to advise Florida education commissioner Pam Stewart on standards, testing, deregulation and other hot topics has set its first meeting of substance for later this month. Stewart announced she would create the Keep Florida Learning Committee back in December, amid the clamor parents, teachers and others angry over the state’s testing system. Hundreds of…
Florida’s testing season has ended. The final bell of the school year is near. Yet so much about the state’s new exams has changed or remains in limbo following a spring filled with testing problems and new legislation. State and local education officials are scrambling to decipher the new laws and implement them for students,…
The panel asked to choose a firm to review the validity of Florida’s new testing system doesn’t appear to have much work to do when it meets Friday. Only one group has submitted a bid to do the work. A partnership of Utah-based Alpine Testing Solutions and Washington, D.C.-based edCount LLC proposed to do the evaluation…
This week brought news of more trouble with Florida’s school testing system. It’s been a familiar refrain this spring: Students across the state sit down to take a computerized test mandated by law, and they can’t log on. Or they can, but then they get logged off. Or something else goes wrong and the tests…
Empowered by a new state law, education leaders in Miami-Dade and Broward counties announced Tuesday they won’t use the results of the new Florida Standards Assessment to hold students back — one of the most polarizing issues when it comes to how Florida uses tests in high-stakes decisions. “We will not allow the results of…
Florida school districts that planned not to count state end-of-course algebra and geometry exams as 30 percent of students’ grades turned out to be prescient. Department of Education K-12 Chancellor Herschel Lyons informed districts on Monday that the results won’t be available in time, anyway. In a memo to superintendents, Lyons wrote that the state…
The Legislature-mandated validity study of Florida’s new accountability tests is officially under way. It started Friday morning with a 90-minute conversation about how to pick a firm to review the exams, and what that firm should look for. The six key areas of the review, as listed on a draft scope of work, were test…
The Florida Standards Assessment Review Selection Panel was established during the 2015 Regular Session in House Bill 7069 for the purpose of selecting an independent entity to conduct an independent verification of the psychometric validity of the Florida Standards Assessment. The selection must occur no later than June 1, 2015, and must consider, at a…
The three-person committee charged with choosing an independent reviewer of Florida’s new state tests will begin its work on Friday. The Standards Review Selection Panel, established in HB 7069, is comprised of appointees from the governor, House speaker and Senate president. The members are Sen. Jeremy Ring, Flagler College president William Proctor and St. Johns schools…
Today’s economy demands that all young people develop high-level literacy, quantitative reasoning, problem solving, communication, and collaboration skills, all grounded in a rigorous and content-rich K-12 curriculum. Acquiring these skills ensures that high school graduates are academically prepared to pursue the future of their choosing. Many state tests, however, continue to mislead the public about…