Florida School Boards Association
With two votes Wednesday, the State Board of Education put to bed a lengthy, heated debate over how difficult Florida’s student testing and school grading formulas should be. Board members made it harder to get a passing score on the tests, and easier for a school to earn an A, just weeks before students begin…
TALLAHASSEE — Although Florida lawmakers don’t plan to revamp the beleaguered Florida Standards Assessments this session, they’re likely to consider a related proposal to let students take other standardized tests — like the ACT or SAT — instead. State Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, this week filed a highly anticipated plan to let students make use…
The state Board of Education, which for years has pushed to toughen standards for Florida students, voted Wednesday to compromise on test scores and school grades while the state continues to wrestle with its newly revised accountability system. The board adopted Education Commissioner Pam Stewart’s recommendations for scores that would see more than half of…
TAMPA — With students already preparing for the first round of standardized tests for 2016, state officials are set to finally decide what to do with 2015’s test scores. Despite calls from the state’s superintendents to do without schools grades for 2015, the Florida Board of Education is poised to vote Wednesday in Tallahassee on…
High school testing is on the brink of a profound shift, as states increasingly choose college-entrance exams to measure achievement. The new federal education law invites that change, but it comes with some big caution signs and unanswered questions. The questions are hanging over a provision of the Every Student Succeeds Act that lets states…
As Florida’s 2016 legislative session fast approaches, lawmakers keep filing education-related bills even during the holiday lull. The latest: Rep. Reggie Fullwood’s proposal to create a social services oriented pilot program for the state’s poorest, most academically struggling schools. One highly anticipated measure, though, remains conspicuously absent. On the heels of spring testing troubles, and amid calls to…
TALLAHASSEE — The Scott administration’s plan to evaluate schools’ performance in 2014-15 without taking into consideration the year-to-year improvement of students is based on an esoteric provision in the state’s education accountability law that lawmakers and school district leaders say is being misused. In 2013, the Legislature amended the state’s law that directs the Department…
Less than a year after lawmakers overhauled public-school testing following the botched rollout of the new Florida Standards Assessments, the debate over how to measure student learning is far from over. A leading senator on education issues is working on legislation that would allow schools to use tests other than the statewide standardized exams, which…
For the past quarter century, federal education policy has been moving in one direction: toward standards-based education redesign, a greater reliance on standardized tests, and bigger role for Washington when it comes to holding schools accountable for student results. President Barack Obama reversed course with the stroke of a pen Thursday, putting states and districts…
Florida education commissioner Pam Stewart’s school grading simulation showed the state would see a similar distribution of A through F marks for 2015 as it saw in 2014. That simple fact led some observers to question how that could be, given the state’s tests and standards were supposed to be more difficult. Since the numbers were…