Nothing Standard About This School Year: #WaiveTheFSA

How is your school year going so far?

Did your school year begin face-to-face or virtually? Are students shifting in and out of virtual learning? Did your district see any dramatic shifts in enrollment? Has your district experienced any failures due to technology? Has the nationwide shortage of laptops meant students are left without necessary devices? Do all kids have adequate WiFi in your community? Has that WiFi been reliable? Have cyber attacks kept students off line? Have Covid positive cases resulted in classrooms or entire schools shutting down? Does your district have a substitute shortage? Are your students experiencing additional loads of stress due to Covid and the associated economic crisis? How many students have had family members pass away from Covid? How many students have become homeless as the result of the Covid recession/depression?

The Covid pandemic has been very disruptive for everyone. School and District staff are working overtime. Providing education during this disruption is not easy. 

There will be challenges. There will be frustrations. The only thing we know for certain is that this will be a school year unlike any other in our lifetimes… there will be nothing standard about this school year.  

Except state mandated, standardized assessments, of course, because…

Florida.

During the least standard year ever, Florida will continue to insist on state mandated standardized testing and they will use those test scores to grade the quality of your community’s schools and the effectiveness of your children’s teachers. Schools with high school grades will be rewarded and those with low grades (usually those serving lower income, higher needs children) will be labeled as “failing” and face the prospect of “turnaround” (aka privatization or closure). Teachers’ contract renewals and salaries will depend on those standardized test scores and VAM, a (even in a good year discredited) calculation that compares a students scores compared to predicted performance and assumes the difference is a result of teacher quality.

If you are a regular reader, you know that we think attaching high stakes to standardized test scores results in “accountabaloney” and has resulted in a test-focused school environment that is not good for children.

And that is in a normal year.

We all know 2020-21 will be anything but normal.

Still, this is what we can expect:

• This is the 2020-2021 Florida Assessment Program. It does NOT include Kindergarten Readiness Testing, The Florida Standards Alternate Assessment, FAIR testing, School Day SAT or PSAT, ACCESS for ELLs to Advanced Placement Exams (you can find the dates for those here).

Notice that the testing windows for the EOC and 10th grade ELA have been extended to last almost the entire fall semester.

• Students whose state assessments were cancelled last spring will be brought back for testing. I know, you remember the Governor saying “Requirements for graduation and promotion and final course grades will be evaluated as though those assessments did not exist,” but, later, they explained that only applied to 3rd graders and graduating seniors. If you have a child who was enrolled in Algebra 1 or 10th grade (passing these assessments are high school graduation requirements), they have probably already been scheduled for retakes this fall. The Algebra 1 EOC is administered over two days. The Grade 10 ELA takes three days (because of the added Writing component). All three days of testing are required to generate an ELA score.

• Students who are studying virtually because of personal or family risk factors, will be called onto campus to sit for state assessments. Five year olds, enrolled in Virtual Kindergarten, have already been called onto campus the take the Florida Kindergarten Readiness Screener.

• There will be more test prep than ever because the same Emergency Order (2020-EO-6) that required “All schools open” also required “Robust Progress Monitoring,” with regular sharing of test data with the State to assure “adequate progress.” Districts will feel the underlying threat of budget cuts and the push to collect progress monitoring data will consume some classrooms (I’m looking at you, I-Ready.).

• Standardized test scores following this unstandardized school year will be used to determine 3rd grade promotion and high school graduation.

• School grades will more nonsensical than usual. In a “regular” year, student learning gains make up a large portion of the school grade calculation (57% of the elementary school calculation) but in 2021, because there are no 2020 spring assessment results, the FLDOE will be calculating “prior prior year learning gains” rendering such calculations as nonsense. (Read more about that here.)

• Time will be spent testing and preparing for testing rather than teaching and learning. Of course this happens every year but in a disrupted school year, classroom time with teachers is precious.

The FLDOE had already announced its intentions to administer state assessments next spring by early July, when they announced Florida would not seek another waiver of federal annual testing requirements for 2021. By September, U.S. Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, announced states  should not anticipate such waivers being granted again, quoting a letter from ed-reform organizations like Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, which said “Leaders should not have to continue to steer recovery efforts in the dark, and families and communities should be able to access the information they deserve about how schools are serving all students.”

In Florida (and elsewhere), test-based school grades are used to advance the narrative that public schools are failing, encouraging families to leave them for private options (charters and vouchers) and suggesting that increased funding of public schools would be both unnecessary and wasteful. Florida’s so-called ed-reformers, which includes our Commissioner of Education and many legislators, need the calculated school grades, which reflect student body socioeconomics, to advance their initiatives. For example, Commissioner Corcoran’s signature legislation was 2017’s infamous HB7069, also known as “Schools of Hope.” HB7069 incentivized corporate charter chains to take over or open near schools, primarily in underserved communities, which had earned D and F school grades. Additionally, HB7069 mandated that “persistently low performing schools” would enter a “turnaround ” process requiring districts to close the school or turn its operations over to a private entity (charter school or external operator). School Grades are essential to make such conversions happen and advance the privatization of public education in Florida. This week, Corcoran’s Board of Education included $40 million for the School of Hope program in its 2021-2022 Legislative Budget Request.

Floridians should expect that, as long as Betsy DeVos is our Secretary of Education and Florida’s Department of Education and Legislature remains dominated by pro-privatization, pro-school choice advocates (which currently describes most, if not all, of our elected Republicans, and a few of our elected Democrats), there will be little relief from state assessments or the high stakes attached to them.

Just north of our border, however, a different story is unfolding. With the support of his Republican Governor, Brian Kemp, Georgia’s State School Superintendent, Richard Woods, is committed to reducing the pressure of high-stakes testing in Georgia classrooms during this pandemic disrupted school year, saying “Who we are will be measured not by a test score, but by how we meet this moment” and insisting on “No test prepping or cramming. No punishing students, teachers, or schools for scores. No giving up weeks to administer, remediate, and administer tests.”

Superintendent Woods’ response to Secretary DeVos underscore what we all know to be true about testing in the time of Covid:

And yet, in a year when instructional time is so precious, why cut into it with high-stakes testing? At a time when our economic outlook is still shaky and millions of dollars are having to be cut from our classrooms, why divert millions to high-stakes tests? At a time when families, students, and educators have understandable anxiety about returning to a new instructional environment, why add the additional stress of high-stakes testing?

Continuing to administer high-stakes tests during these unprecedented and uncertain times is, sadly, more about adults than the needs of students and teachers.

Those who push the rhetoric about moving forward with high-stakes summative testing during a pandemic show total disregard for the realities faced by our families, students, and educators. Make no mistake – these test scores will not be used to support teaching and learning, as the proponents suggest. They will be used to undermine our public education system, understate the heroic efforts of our teachers, and undercut any opportunity we have for a full K-12 recovery.

https://www.gadoe.org/External-Affairs-and-Policy/communications/Pages/PressReleaseDetails.aspx?PressView=default&pid=800

Seriously, Florida, if Georgia can do this, so can we. We just need to vote better. Become a #FLPublicEdVoter and move beyond test scores.