Andrea Rediske, the mother of Ethan Rediske, worked tirelessly to persuade the State Legislature in Florida to pass an act that would have eliminated the state’s relentless demand to test Ethan as he lay dying in hospice.

Ethan was born with profound disabilities; he was blind and suffered from cerebral palsy, yet the state tormented him to take its standardized tests. Read Andrea Rediske’s testimony to the state legislature here. 

The act, which was to be called the Ethan Rediske Act, would have allowed local officials to make the decision not to test students like Ethan, rather than going through an elaborate process that required a waiver from the state, one that must be signed by the Florida Secretary of Education, who must review and personally sign every single waiver.

You see, in Florida, standardized testing has become the Holy Grail. It is the Golden Calf. It is the one idea that has permeated the thinking of almost every legislator. If they cannot measure children’s ability to pick the right box or bubble on a test purchased from a major vendor, then education ceases to exist in the state of Florida. This might be thought of as Jeb Bush’s theology, and he has a large number in his testing cult.

Andrea Rediske thought that it was madness to try to test Ethan. She “knew it made no sense for her son, who couldn’t speak and was fed through a tube, to be asked about how a peach tastes.

Or to ask a blind child to point to a picture of a monkey. (That’s another real-life example for another student in Orange County.)

Or to then professionally evaluate those kids’ teachers based on how the kids score on tests they could never really take.”

After Ethan’s death, his mother pushed hard for passage of “The Ethan Rediske Act,” to protect children like him from being harassed by the state. Pam Stewart, the State Commissioner of Education, then wrote a letter to every educator in the state, implying  that Andrea Rediske’s valiant fight to protect other children with severe disabilities was “a political effort to attack assessments by using the tragic situations of children with special needs.” In other words, the state commissioner chastised Andrea Rediske for “politicizing” her son’s death. There are times when you do wonder whether  public officials have any sense of shame. This is one of them. The appropriate response from Stewart would have been to offer her sincere condolences to the Rediske family and to offer to help change the law so that children like Ethan were never again harassed by state officials. Conservatives claim to be against “big government,” but it appears from this example that “big government” is just fine so long as they are in charge and can invade other people’s privacy, their confidential student data, their hospital rooms, their hospices, and their bedrooms.

Andrea Rediske wrote to tell me that the Ethan Rediske Act will not be passed, but language protecting children in his condition will be inserted into another bill. The state bureaucracy–especially the highly politicized and intellectually vacuous Florida Department of Education, could not bear the thought of the act passing. But Andrea Rediske wins anyway because the heart of Ethan’s Act survives.

 

Andrea Rediske wrote:

“Ethan’s Act is indeed dead, but it’s been incorporated into a larger bill on school accountability.

Here is the link to the bill: http://mfhmobile.info/Sections/Documents/loaddoc.aspx?FileName=_h7117c1.docx&DocumentType=Bill&BillNumber=7117&Session=2014

Page 38 has the verbiage on children with medical complexity. It states that a child with a medical complexity determined by their physician and IEP team will not be required to take standardized testing.

 

Assuming this bill passes, we may conclude that in the future, children like Ethan will not be tortured by the state of Florida to take meaningless tests. Nor will their parents be tortured by insensitive, heartless bureaucrats in the Florida Department of Education.

Ethan has won a victory for other children.

God rest his soul.