Why Does Florida continue to administer state-mandated Writing assessments?
This week opens the two-week testing window for Florida’s statewide B.E.S.T. ELA Writing assessment. Florida’s 4th-10th grade students will take a 120 minute plus, computer based writing assessment. The question everyone should be asking is “Why?”
- Writing assessments are not required for federal government accountability measures.
- Since 2022, Writing scores are no longer part of Florida’s School Grade calculation.
- B.E.S.T. Writing assessments are no longer combined with FAST ELA Reading assessments to create an overall ELA score.
- B.E.S.T. Writing scores do not factor into student assessment graduation requirements.
- B.E.S.T. Writing scores are not used to determine statutory promotion or retention decision.
On the other hand, there are plenty of reason to argue for eliminating Florida’s state writing assessment:
- The B.E.S.T. Writing assessments are computer based, meaning students as young as 9 years old are typing essays on computers… forget cursive instruction, even printing is, apparently, no longer necessary.
- B.E.S.T. Writing assessments are graded by artificial intelligence/”hybrid scoring” – using “a large representative sample of Florida student responses scored by highly trained and qualified human scorers to train an automated scoring (AS) engine, which then scores the majority of student responses.” Why do parents need an extra AI-graded writing assessment when their child’s teacher provides regular assessments of their writing ability?
- Rather than encouraging creative writing, the state writing assessment encourages the training of students to write formulaically.
- These assessments are time consuming – demanding at least 14 hours of standardized writing assessments to determine scores that serve no purpose in the state Accountability system.
Parents should be asking their child’s teachers and lawmakers why Florida continues to administer state-mandated writing assessments that have no bearing on the state’s accountability system.