Celebrating the End of the FSA? Not so F.A.S.T.

There was a big announcement by Governor DeSantis and the Florida Department of Education today.

“On September 14, 2021, Governor DeSantis announced that the state will file Legislation to eliminate the common-core based, end-of-year Florida Statewide Assessment and create the new Florida Assessment of Student Thinking (F.A.S.T.). By creating the F.A.S.T. plan, Florida is becoming the first state in the nation to fully implement progress monitoring instead of end-of-year standardized testing, and will fully eliminate Common Core.” https://www.fldoe.org/fast/index.stml

Of course, the devil will be in the details. The proposal, apparently, only applies to the basic Florida Standards Assessments exams given for English/Language Arts and Math, but NOT for end-of-course exams in subjects such as Algebra, U.S. History and Biology. There will be little impact on the amount of testing in high schools. Already, Commissioner Richard Corcoran has assured us that the high stakes accountability measures, like school grades, teacher evaluations, “turnaround,” third grade retention, etc., will remain – presumably now attached to the scores achieved on these new state mandated progress monitoring assessments. As regular readers know, from day one this blog has insisted that “The primary problem with high stakes, standardized tests is the “high stakes”, not that the test is standardized. The right tests, when used appropriately, can be used to inform instruction. Currently, in Florida, these tests are being used for almost everything but informing instruction (retention, graduation, remediation, merit pay, school grade, etc).” I am not feeling hopeful about this announcement…

Immediately following the press conference, I started receiving text messages and social media alerts. Many were celebrating the “great news.” Some were surprised.

I was not surprised.

Education advocates have been aware of the so-called ed-reformer’s intent to move away from year-end testing for a while. For example, here is a 2019 Facebook exchange I had with a friend shortly after Governor DeSantis had issued Executive Order 19-32, which promised to improve Florida’s education system by eliminating Common Core, streamlining testing and “outline a pathway for Florida to become the most literate state in the nation.”

A friend asked:

And my response was:

Wow… it is like I could predict the future.

Actually, anyone paying attention to the education “reform” efforts in Florida should have seen this coming. Likewise, if they were really paying attention, they would not be celebrating today. This is part of an ongoing threat to public education.

In January 2017, I published my remarks to the Monroe County School Board in a piece I titled “Competency Based Education: Destroying Public Schools One Profitable Data Point at a Time.” My intention was to draw attention to amount of data collection happening in our public schools, under the guise of “Competency Based Education” (CBE) or “personalized learning”, and how profitable that data had become.

“CBE is a data driven education system that follows a set of prescribed standards and requires demonstration of “competency” before advancement. It has embedded testing within the curriculum that collects hidden streams of data via unknown algorithms. Stealth, continuous data–collected by vendors, can be shared with third parties–parental consent not needed.

The goal is to digitalize education so data can be collected and, remember, data is gold.”

I explained that, with frequent or continuous data collection, there would be no need for a year-end state assessment:

“The good news is that, with CBE, end of course exams and the FSA will become obsolete. When data on student progress can be collected every minute of every day, the “BIG” test is no longer necessary.

The bad news… teachers won’t be necessary, either. Current pilot programs include teachers as facilitators but soon taxpayers will wonder why we need to pay a professional to monitor students engaged in primarily an online education and a move will be made to hire a less expensive substitute. By then high quality teachers, stripped of all professional decision making, will have already left the profession in droves.

Why even have brick and mortar buildings for an education that mostly takes place on line?

Why even call it education anymore when it is really the harvesting of student data?

Consider this the alarm.”

So here we are. Instead of a year end high stakes test, kids will take shorter, more frequent high stakes tests. I wonder what company will get the contract to create the new assessments? Who will have access to the student data? Will districts use their own progress monitoring tools to ensure students will perform well enough on the state progress monitoring? Again, the devil will be in the details.

The Senate Education Committee is scheduled to discuss K-12 Standards and Assessments next week. Perhaps they will explain some of those details then…