Florida has a harsh third grade retention policy. Students who don’t pass the third-grade state test must repeat the grade.
A few days ago, more than a dozen parents filed suit against the state for the arbitrary and capricious way this state was implemented in counties across the state. The parents opted their children out of the testing to protest the law.
“There is no rational governmental interest served by the defendants arbitrary and capricious decision to retain plaintiffs’ children because they opted out of standardized tests, but otherwise earned passing grades on their report cards and had no reading deficiencies,” the lawsuit reads.
The law is interpreted differently in different counties.
One Orange County plaintiff had a daughter who was on the honor roll, the suit said, but “is being retained in the third grade because of no FSA scores and because her teacher was not informed of the criteria for developing a student portfolio during the school year.”
In Sarasota County, one of the parents who is suing kept her child out of the state testing in third grade. The district said he had to repeat the grade, even though his work all year had been satisfactory.
However, the district changed course and decided to let the child go on to fourth grade with his peers, rather than subject him to punishment for opting out of the test.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Is the threat of being sued the only path to sane policy?
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No. Apparently, the threat of being sued is not enough. You actually have to initiate the lawsuit….
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Egads, under threat the right decision is made.
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So proud of families in Sarasota for holding the system accountable and doing what is right for children. The Sarasota County School Board is familiar with the struggles that students face because of their interpretation of the 3rd grade mandatory retention law in Florida. This little fella spoke to them a few months ago about how that law affected him. He had A-B honor roll ALL year and they failed him because of the test. His impassioned speech tells exactly how kids feel in our educational system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf-vrS6ujtw
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One really has to question the intelligence and education of each member of Florida’s BOE. It really was obvious they had no case given the lack of consistency of implementation. If each member had high scores on the SAT or ACT it really would mean that there is an inverse relationship between scores and achievement: the higher your score, the lower your intelligence.
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I don’t assume that the members of the Florida State Board of Education or the Florida legislature had high SAT or ACT scores. They should release them and let us judge.
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