Florida’s testing system may have finally jumped the shark.
If you don’t know Jumping the Shark first happened on an old episode of Happy
Days, where the Fonz on water skis jumped a shark and it signaled the decline
of the once great show. HB 7069 signals that Florida has jumped the shark on
testing.
Among other things in the bill it says this year’s tests won’t
be used unless they are independently verified to be valid. That is right
friends, we have spent tens of millions of dollars, including millions to buy
test questions from Utah and we’re not sure if the test is valid are not. How
is it possible that we have gotten to this point?
It even gets worse because Tallahassee has also said, they
don’t believe the Department of Education has the ability to or doesn’t trust
them enough to tell us if they are valid or not, so instead they are going to
hire an outside organization to do so.
At a minimum there should be a house cleaning at the Department
of Education and on the State Board of Education as they have led us to this
point. Then Governor Scott through executive order should say this year’s tests
will be used for nothing but research purposes.
We shouldn’t be using the state’s children and teachers as Guinea
pigs, wasting millions of dollars is pretty bad too.
So true. Why not have the state department branches evaluate the content? Ie. elementary reading department evaluate those FSAs? Wouldn't cost the state anything, but then again reliance on them to admit any testing errors once found. Or perhaps, form a board from content specalists & teachers from various counties in FL to vet the test content? It is quite silly to pay $$$ to a company whose test validity must analyzed externally...just adding it on more tax payer money already spent on this whole testing mess. Why not trust some of the bright minds of effective educators and district leaders to review assessments?
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