Julie DelegalRep. Debbie Mayfield, R-Vero Beach, has been listening to parent complaints about high-stakes testing. Mayfield, like most parents and educators, is so frustrated with the entire standards-based accountability system that she wants to give entire school districts the ability to “opt out” of standards-based tests altogether.
Judging from an action alert obtained from a Tea Party email network, which strongly opposes all things Common Core, Mayfield’s bill (HB 877) could gain traction.
From the email: “Common Core has created a culture of extreme testing and oppressive federal intervention on students, teachers and school administrators.” The email then urges Tea Party members to call their lawmakers and encourage them to co-sponsor the opt-out bill.
Kathleen Oropeza says that the opt-out movement is a signal from parents that Florida’s accountability system is making their children miserable. Oropeza co-founded the parent-advocacy organization Fund Education Now and is a named plaintiff in the lawsuit filed to enforce constitutional provisions regarding education.
“Everything is bearing down on children,” she says, ticking off a list: whether the teacher gets a good evaluation, the school grade, and whether the child gets promoted or will face remediation and a loss of electives. “Children can lose their magnet status,” she added. Students can be precluded from earning technical certificates as well.
“Where’s the breaking point?” Oropeza asks.
Mayfield’s proposal may offer a clue about the breaking point for Florida families. HB 877 would permit districts to administer norm-referenced tests in lieu of implementing the FCAT’s ordained successor, the Common-Core-based Florida Standards Assessments.
Many private schools use norm-referenced tests, or NRTs. NRTs put children on a bell curve, without giving us much information about what they need to learn in order to advance.
Parent-advocate Colleen Wood believes that upping the standards on public school students drives families to seek vouchers for private schools, because voucher schools don’t administer the punitive FCAT or FSA tests. Privatization is the fourth leg of the four-legged stool that is Jeb Bush-branded reform in Florida. The other three, high-stakes testing, school grades, and test-based teacher evaluations, turn up the heat on public schools, making privatized alternatives all the more attractive.
“We’ve already had poor families opting out of high-stakes tests,’” Wood said. “They’re opting out of public school. It’s called vouchers.” Wood serves on the national board of the Network for Public Education, and founded the grassroots advocacy organization, 50th No More.
Choosing vouchers was made much easier by last year’s expansion of the Tax Credit Scholarship program to middle class families. Previously, the voucher program was only available to low-income students.
Why Standards-based Education?
The move from NRTs to standards-based learning in public schools has its roots in an honorable mission: instead of placing students on a bell curve like NRTs do, reformers decided to deconstruct the curriculum into grade-level standards and objectives to make learning accessible to all students.
Standards-based approaches permit educators to identify and fill in skill deficits to move students forward.
Picture it this way: Florida’s standards-based tests (FCAT, FSA) are analogous to a footrace in which students must run a certain distance before they’re permitted to advance to the next level. Norm-referenced tests, instead, simply show us where the child stopped running, and they compare that spot to where other students stopped running.
For years, critics of the state’s voucher program, aka, The Tax Credit Scholarship Program, have cried foul because the voucher schools use the NRT instead of the FCAT or FSA, while public schools are held to higher standards.
Private voucher schools, 71 percent of which are religious schools, have been claiming “gains” by using a test that wasn’t designed to measure “gains” in the strict, educational sense. Minor fluctuations upward or downward on an NRT don’t tell us much about what a student is actually learning – just where that student stands in relation to his matched peers.
To measure actual “gains,” voucher schools would need to administer standards-based tests, like the FCAT or the upcoming, Common-Core-based Florida Standards Assessments. Test. Why don’t they?
Rep. Mayfield has proven less tone-deaf to parent and educator concerns than many lawmakers. But educators say her proposal to do away with standards-based tests amounts to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
According to current Duval school board member Becki Couch, “If standards-based tests were used as they were intended, they’d be better [than NRTs] … but they’ve turned into a punitive tool.” Couch is an educator and formerly chaired both the Duval County School Board, and the Legislative Committee for the Florida School Boards Association.
Couch pointed out that the appropriate use of the FCAT or Florida Standards Assessments is to diagnose student skill deficits. Now those tests, Couch said, have become the “ugly monster that’s taken over the joy in the classroom.”
Eleventh–graders get a break – sort of
Sen. Don Gaetz, a former Senate president who currently chairs the education appropriations subcommittee, echoes Couch’s sentiments somewhat. Gaetz told Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sentinel that standards-based education is not the problem. He went on to blame Gov. Scott’s Department of Education for taking testing too far.
Gov. Rick Scott, in turn, has responded by suspending the eleventh-grade language arts test. Since students must pass a similar tenth-grade test in order to graduate, advocates have asked, “Why make them take both?”
At least one lawmaker thinks they shouldn’t have to. Sen. Bill Montford, D-Tallahassee, who also heads the Florida Association of District School Superintendents, has introduced SB 774 to end the duplicative practice.
The irony, Couch noted, is that while removing the eleventh-grade test takes graduation pressure off students, it won’t actually reduce the overall number of tests. In order to satisfy the teacher-evaluations requirements, students will have to take another test, likely an end of course exam.
Florida DOE Commissioner Pam Stewart also recommended eliminating the eleventh-grade exam and reducing testing in general in the department’s review of the state’s accountability system, published February 18.
Holding Students Harmless
In addition to eliminating the elventh-grade test, Sen. Montford’s SB 774 would suspend high-stakes, punitive use of the new FSA test for three years.
That means the test data would be used to develop benchmarks and cutoff scores, but not to determine student promotions, teacher evaluations, or school grades. It’s a move supported by the Florida Association of District School Superintendents, the Florida School Boards Association and the Florida Education Association, the Florida’s teachers union.
FEA President Andy Ford told Florida Politics reporter James Call that the state needs time to make sure the tests are valid before school officials use them as the bases for life-altering decisions.
Making retention decisions and creating school grades based on a brand new test is unacceptable to Wood.
“It’s a game our state has set up and the game is rigged,” Wood said.
“Our kids are set up to fail. When you give a test that 70 percent of students failed in Utah, you’re setting up our kids to fail.” (The FSA has been field tested in Utah, but not yet in Florida.)
Oropeza agrees. “Entire lives have to revolve around this flawed tool.”
Oropeza supports SB 774’s “hold harmless” provisions. She says the bill has contemplated input from educational professionals.
“It would hold our children harmless through the transition [to the new test],”she said.
To recap, as of this writing, here are the educational testing bills to watch, now that the legislature is in session:
• Rep. Debbie Mayfield’s HB 877 proposing that districts be permitted to opt-out of the Common-Core-based FSA test.
• Sen. John Legg’s SB 616, which would lower the test-based component of teacher evaluations from 50 percent to 40 percent statewide, would reduce some end-of-course testing, and would cap testing to 5 percent of the school year.
• Sen. Bill Montford’s SB 774, which would reduce testing and provide a transition period before FSA grades are used in teacher evaluations, student-retention decisions, or school grades.
Part one examines one senator’s move to lower the stakes in Florida’s high-stakes education accountability system, and how they got so high in the first place. A version of this article also appears in Folio Weekly.
Julie Delegal lives and writes in Jacksonville. She sent all three of her children to public magnet schools. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
