FLORIDA COMPUTER EXAM FIASCO
SHOWS NEW ASSESSMENTS “NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME;”
COMPREHENSIVE ASSESSMENT REFORM NEEDED TO REPLACE POLITICALLY DRIVEN TESTING SYSTEM
Problems with the new, computer-administered Florida Standards Assessments are widespread. At least a dozen school districts, including Broward, Hillsborough, Miami- Dade, Orange, Oskaloosa, Palm Beach, Pasco, Pinellas, Seminole, St. Johns, Sumter, and Volusia reported total breakdowns or significant testing delays.
According to Bob Schaeffer, a Florida resident who is Public Education Director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, which monitors standardized exams across the country, “Florida computerized tests are clearly not ready for prime time. The reason is that they were rushed into place based on a Tallahasee-mandated schedule not technical competence or educational readiness.”
Schaeffer continued, “Parents, teachers, superintendents and computer experts all warned that such breakdowns were inevitable. Yet, policy-makers ignored the warnings as well as evidence of similar problems last year in Florida and a dozen other states.”
“Today’s fiasco once again demonstrates that Florida testing policy is being driven by politicians and ideologues, not educators,” Schaeffer concluded. ”Florida schools and the children they serve need a pause in testing insanity and a thorough overhaul of the state’s assessment system. Enough is enough”
FairTest Public Education Director Bob Schaeffer has lived full-time in southwest Florida for fifteen years. He works closely with assessment reform groups in Lee County and across the state.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Not to mention children under 12 should be using a pencil and not a keyboard with their little fingers.
There us a similar “statewide testing fiasco” happening in New Jersey today. First, many districts had to cancel testing today due to the weather causing a delayed opening. At one local high school, here was the update given by students:
At start of day, 11th graders (approximately 740 students) were set to take the test in the two different school cafeterias. They were set up with 4 -5 kids at each table. Each kid received their own set of headphones. It is our understanding that the test started 45 minutes late in one cafeteria due to connectivity issues. The other cafeteria started few minutes late. Block 1 (the high school runs on a block schedule of 4 blocks a day, A days and B days – this is when testing was for juniors) was to be released out of testing at 10:30ish, but students were not, and therefore late for next set of classes (Block 2). Approximately 1/2 of the kids in the one cafeteria refused the test (that’s approximately 90 students). Kids who refused were listening to music and reports say kids were talking to one another the entire time. Apparently students were to test only 1 section, but many kids did all 3 sections because they were given codes to 3 sections. This raises the question of whether the test would be invalidated or not. Kids were also supposed to read district provided material but many kids read what they wanted to read. Many students are angry, and some were crying because parents forced them to take the test. Regularly scheduled classes began 15 minutes late (keep in mind class is shortened already due to testing schedule and now 90 minute delay). Students rushed sections not knowing they had more time; kids were talking to others during the testing period. Students advised that normally scheduled classes are missing 75% of students (this is at approximately 11:15am) – so much for “no interrupted instruction” as our district keeps telling us. Students had no time to change for gym, and were then trying to get to lunch – remember, kids were running late testing in the cafeterias. Students are estimating/hearing – I STRESS hearing — 30-50% of juniors refused to test. Student in second block classes did nothing because no students showed up (running late from testing)… The cafeterias had so many technical issues, and in one cafeteria, students barely saw tables full of other students actually testing.
Some districts reported beginning testing, having the system crash only a few minutes into the test, and then deciding to cancel the test for the entire day. Because of widespread computer glitches, many students who were testing (and those not testing who were required to stay in the testing room in some districts) ended up sitting for hours – therefore missing instructional time – waiting for the technology to get up and running. Numbers are flying all over Facebook groups, such as “Opt Out of State Standardized Tests: New Jersey” with numbers like, 30% refusal, 40% refusal, even 76% refusal. If this is how the first day of testing went, I can’t imagine how testing over these next few weeks and even into May will go. Many of us hope to see more and more students refuse the test the day of as this progresses, as more and more parents and students experience the mess of a test that PARCC is.
** There “is” a similar “statewide testing fiasco” happening in New Jersey today. Apologies for the misspelling.
Makes me wonder, how is the testing going at Del Barton?
Meanwhile, Hespe says “testing good” (of course, teachers bad). http://www.nj.com/education/2015/03/parcc_starts_nj.html#incart_river
Sounds like the SNAFU in Indiana, where the vendor McGraw Hill had a complete shutdown in some schools. The whole testing regime was rushed into place by Tony Bennett, who left the mess with his predecessor Glenda Ritz.
Didn’t Bill Gates claim it would take at least ten years to see if these corporate reforms worked for public education?
That means, if Gates has his way, the United States will sacrifice an entire generation of children, 50 million of them, while the corporate reformers sweep out the transparent, non-profit, democratic public education system that has had nothing but slow and steady improvement for more than a century and that Standford studies reveal is better than what the corporate reformers are replacing it with and other reports have revealed is bringing back segregation and creating a culture of failure—out with the old and in with the new opaque, for profit, undemocratic, corporate, private sector, CEO run Charters that are mostly worse or the same as the schools they are replacing across the country.
“Didn’t Bill Gates claim it would take at least ten years to see if these corporate reforms worked for public education?”
Yes, he did. Honestly, only a moron would have to wait 10 years to see this is a failure. Momentum is building…I’m not sure if it is this year or next year but this seems to be on its way out. But then again Gate is an idiot who thought stack and rank at Microsoft would improve his windows system and instead it probably created the worst version yet. My husband is in IT and he couldn’t believe that Gates came up with such an awful system for his employees but he said it explained the terrible Microsoft products during that time. So I guess if it doesn’t work the first time inflict the nonsense on education.
Bill Gates has had his ten years. His agenda has created a far-reaching and a still evolving fiasco, aided by other foundations and USDE.
My research shows that he started serious funding of policy and advocacy in 2002 with money flowing to Achieve and the American Diploma Project and “institutes” that jerry rigged sloppy survey results ( in five states) to pretend that requirements for entry into college and a career were not different. That pitiful exercise was leveraged to construct the idea of mastering a common core in ELA and math as a prerequisite for entry into postsecondary education and ultimately the need for new tests for high school graduation. He helped pay for the promoting all that as a state-led effort.
He paid for promotion of the Common Core State Standards and helped states apply for Race to the Top Grants. He has funded the US News reports on teacher education programs. His foundation pays for editorial content in EdWeek. In 2005, Gates put the surveillance systems in place that created the “teacher of record” concept, linking every teacher to every student they teach and collecting data on every student including their health records. That system is still in place for judging teachers by the test scores of students because federal funds flowed into the same project. He has funded data warehouses where states keep these records. In Ohio a major warehouse is Batelle for Kids.
We need a National Stop the Tests Boycott Day. Diane, any ideas? Is April 15th good?
If Bill Gates believed what he is preaching in this video – women equality – “more education means a higher wages …. Then he should be fighting for higher wages for teachers – this video makes me depressed
http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/11/8014563/bill-gates-education-future-of-online-courses-third-world
KARMA!
Sounds like the tests are boycotting themselves!
Add Brevard County to the Florida Disaster. The state says the had some “glitches” in the system. Not so, it was a fiasco, and our students are the victims. They were ready, the teachers were ready. If any teacher performed as the state did we would lose our teaching credentials and probably face criminal charges.
It will be interesting to see if Govenor Scott will step up and take responsibility for this disaster.