War DeSantis calls for end to standardized testing in Florida - De Santis continues his based streak

DeSantis calls for end to standardized testing in Florida

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced on Tuesday that the state would replace the “outdated” Florida Standards Assessment (FSA) with a progress monitoring system that periodical…

thehill.com

DeSantis calls for end to standardized testing in Florida​

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced on Tuesday that the state would replace the "outdated" Florida Standards Assessment (FSA) with a progress monitoring system that periodically evaluates student performance.

“Florida’s education focus should be students’ growth and how we restore the conversation between parents and teachers in support of students’ growth,” DeSantis said in a press release about the change.

The new proposed system would include three shorter tests in the fall, winter and spring in an effort to assess students in "real-time" rather than with a single, longer exam. The new program will require 75 percent less testing time than the FSA testing model, according to the governor's announcement on Tuesday morning.

"We believe that having results monitored and measured is very, very important. But we also think that the FSA is outmoded at this point and that we need to move forward with a more, I'd say, nimble and effective approach," DeSantis said at Doral Academy Preparatory School on Tuesday.

DeSantis made the announcement alongside Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran, who called the FSA testing "antiquated" and lauded the change as a "huge victory for the school system."

DeSantis said that while the legislation still needs to be worked on, support for it was strong. He added that he is hopeful to have new legislation fully implemented by the 2022-2023 school year.

 

[Corpun]

DeSantis continues to do great things. I'm likely not the only one here who has suffered under shitty public schools in addition to standardized testing but this is a step in the right direction, though fixing education is a long journey.

 

[Dona Morte]

This is a GREAT idea.
Progress monitoring is the state by state responsibility.
Not a one size fits all.
I do not give a shit if a kid can make a certain number but weather they can read, write and compute by the time they are an adult.

 

[Meat Target]

I presume the teacher's unions are shrieking about this already, because DeSantis is the one doing it they can no longer phone in their work THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

 

[Mal0]

This is a GREAT idea.
Progress monitoring is the state by state responsibility.
Not a one size fits all.
I do not give a shit if a kid can make a certain number but weather they can read, write and compute by the time they are an adult.

Agreed. If they can't tell the whether outside, then the school system has failed.

 

[TerminalTryHard]

Thank fucking god, standardized testing is a literal cancer that's been fucking our education for it's entire exitance.

It's also big money, so expect a whole bunch of reeeing.

 

[Corpun]

I presume the teacher's unions are shrieking about this already, because DeSantis is the one doing it they can no longer phone in their work THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

Teacher's unions will always shriek about anything. They're part of the problem as they cover the asses for incompetent retards.

 

[Iceland Heavy]

I presume the teacher's unions are shrieking about this already, because DeSantis is the one doing it they can no longer phone in their work THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

Hasn't standardized testing been racism for a while now anyway? He might actually not get much resistance to this and he might actually be able to replace it with a functional system instead of just shitting your pants and doing nothing because any kind of standards are literally Jim Crow.

 

[Meat Target]

Hasn't standardized testing been racism for a while now anyway? He might actually not get much resistance to this and he might actually be able to replace it with a functional system instead of just shitting your pants and doing nothing because any kind of standards are literally Jim Crow.

Standardized testing is now anti-racist, because Ron DeSantis opposes it. DeSantis is Republican, and therefore racist. So anything he opposes is anti-racist by definition which may change.

 

[Harvey Danger]

I'm not sure this is actually better. Schools basically come to a stop on the day they do testing, and don't schedule other tests around it. Even if " the new program will require 75 percent less testing time", schools will probably still schedule around the test events, but now 3 times a year instead of once.

I bet they start doing half days when they do tests. If they really are short enough to just take up 1-2 class periods, maybe that will make the excess preparation and disruption seem absurd enough to avoid. But for some schools that still interrupts the normal flow enough that they'll try to get out of the rest of the day. (If they can; there are state-mandated minimum numbers of instructional hours per year, this could cut into the buffer.)

 

[Constellationzero]

IDK how this will improve things, but FWIW:

When I taught social studies, I spent very little time teaching actual US History, World History, Government and Econ. Why?

Because I had to spend astronomical amounts of time teaching the DBQ. And even when the DBQ landed somewhere on the arrow of time I was teaching that semester, I had to teach shit like:

* How to write a thesis statement
* Don't plagiarize 101
* Paragraphs are your friend
* Just the facts. I ain't reading "All That Shit" by you.

Then I spent three WHOLE ASS DAYS at central office with all the other social studies teachers in the district...reading, watching my IQ drop as I read, and grading. And I had to have a sub assigned for those days.

All this while I taught at the high school that was RIGHT NEXT DOOR to the community college extension where many of the little bastards reminded me on a persistent basis, that they are in COLLAGE, DAMMIT, "I know how to write a paper!"
Most weren't even sure which bathroom to use, or were able to locate AFRICA the CONTINENT on a Rand McNally atlas.

 

[Only A Retard Sometimes]

scantron lobby fixed to kill desantis

 

[Dr. Barry Nyle]

Good move but I generally hate this guy. He gives me middle manager flashbacks, making all kinds of lever pulls and button presses to say he had done anything at all against the illusion of laziness.

He was bought out by the cruise and travel industry and usurped municipal governments who wanted to exercise more autonomy of their communities. Every expat acts like he's God, I just see a Mickey Mousified loser who nearly lost to a gay meth smoking black man no one heard of.

E: I also grew up under the system and the "standards" were always a joke. Normal classes, i.e., anything not honors or AP chem didn't even get to experiment with chemical reactions.

As a lecturer, I first cover the material but my main focus is on using current events to provoke critical thinking.

 

[Standardized Profile]

What's wrong with standardized tests? If you want to get a driver's license, get AP credit, go to a competitive school, or join the military, you have to take a standardized test. Why does everyone hate standardized tests in K-12? Is it the concept of testing itself, or the design of the tests, or what they do with the results?

 

[Beavis]

What's wrong with standardized tests? If you want to get a driver's license, get AP credit, go to a competitive school, or join the military, you have to take a standardized test. Why does everyone hate standardized tests in K-12? Is it the concept of testing itself, or the design of the tests, or what they do with the results?

A causes a lot of schools to emphasize teaching for the test and ignoring everything else.

I presume the teacher's unions are shrieking about this already, because DeSantis is the one doing it they can no longer phone in their work THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

Most teachers seem to be in favor of ditching standardized tests.

scantron lobby fixed to kill desantis

Since my skoo started using google suite products and every kid has a chrome book the teachers just use google forms to create tests and quizes. It's an electronic scantron.

 

[Only A Retard Sometimes]

A causes a lot of schools to emphasize teaching for the test and ignoring everything else.

Most teachers seem to be in favor of ditching standardized tests.

Since my skoo started using google suite products and every kid has a chrome book the teachers just use google forms to create tests and quizes. It's an electronic scantron.

fugg i got out HS in 2016 and already feel like a tech illiterate old man

 

[The Last Stand]

What's wrong with standardized tests? If you want to get a driver's license, get AP credit, go to a competitive school, or join the military, you have to take a standardized test. Why does everyone hate standardized tests in K-12? Is it the concept of testing itself, or the design of the tests, or what they do with the results?

Let's use the driver's license for example. You're being taught how to operate a vehicle. The rules of the road, what to do and what not to do and when and why. Now imagine a driver's ed school where it's less about operating the car and more about memorizing arbitrary tasks to inflate scores. You pass the test, but do you come out with tangible skill on operating a vehicle? No, but at least you know what a 5-cylinder motor is!

That's the problem with how standardized tests are executed.

 

[Mealy Mouth Spittle]

Wonder if he is trying to get on the good side of the teacher's unions since he is cracking down on the mask mandates? Seems like a very political move. He isn't getting rid of standardized testing altogether, just taking the emphasis off of one make or break test. And I'm sure the testing companies (like Pearson, if that is who they use) will charge the same amount of money (or perhaps even more if they have to do more than 1 test a year).

 

[Jarch6]

What's wrong with standardized tests? If you want to get a driver's license, get AP credit, go to a competitive school, or join the military, you have to take a standardized test. Why does everyone hate standardized tests in K-12? Is it the concept of testing itself, or the design of the tests, or what they do with the results?

I would say that they tend to incentivize bad teaching methods and lead to poor judgments from a governmental perspective as to the efficacy of teachers. If you have this national standard that all teachers are weighed up against in regards to how well they taught their students, teachers are going to be incentivized to teach to the tests (especially since they are usually specific knowledge tests) which is often unenjoyable for the teacher and the students. In addition, because students don't have the same intelligence this makes standardized testing an unfair assessment of their ability to teach. These nationalized school reform programs like common core have been ineffective at best and disastrous at worst so it's best to just let the teachers figure it out (and reciprocally give the parents the choice of where to send their kids so we get a sort of free-market approach to teaching).

Now for college acceptance, this is not an issue since the SATs are more general knowledge tests and act as pseudo-IQ tests (the earlier renditions were even more g-loaded). It would be disastrous to the worth of the degree if they stopped using SATs as a metric (not to say that the value of a college degree hasn't already decreased precipitously because of lower standards).

 

[Dubu Kimchi]

Standardized tests do serve a purpose though, in that students (or whole groups of students) who are failing to achieve certain benchmarks of performance can be identified earlier on in their academic careers and the problems can be addressed before the kids get too far along. You might say that the individual teachers and schools should be able to do that, and that's correct they should but sometimes they don't. Hence why we get some famous cases of high school graduates being functionally illiterate (but get accepted into university to play sports), Standardized tests help identify those problem areas (or problem schools/teachers). There are downsides of these tests as well, but in their core I think they do have a legitimate purpose.