A state court judge in Florida will soon issue a ruling that will either validate or refute parents’ right to opt their child out of state testing. The specific issue is the high-stakes third grade reading test; if students don’t pass it, they may be held back, even if their teacher says they are proficient readers.
A state judge is weighing a decision that could shake Florida’s education-accountability system following a marathon hearing Monday in Tallahassee.
After nearly nine hours of testimony and arguments, Leon County Circuit Judge Karen Gievers wrapped up a hearing on state and local policies for allowing students to move to the fourth grade but did not rule on a request that would allow about a dozen students across Florida to advance.
The practical effect of Gievers’ decision, and the appeals that are almost certain to follow, could either validate or shatter the “opt out” movement led by parents who say a state standardized test should not decide whether their children are allowed to move from third grade to fourth grade.
The parents of the students involved in the case told their children to “minimally participate” in the Florida Standards Assessment for third grade by filling in their names, breaking the seals on the tests and then refusing to answer any questions.
Those parents believe state law gives them the right to tell their children not to answer questions on the test. But while the law spells out ways to advance that don’t require passing the assessment, the Florida Department of Education and school districts say that doesn’t give students the opportunity to refuse to take it.
Gievers, who seemed in an earlier hearing to sympathize with the parents, gave no clear indication of how she intended to rule on the request for an injunction.
“You’ve given me a lot to look at, and I plan to do this the right way,” she said.
But the hearing laid bare not only the legal questions at the heart of the case, but the philosophical ones: Is a report card based on a year’s worth of work a better measure of a student’s knowledge, or is an objective test the proper measure? Where is the balance between a parent’s right to control his or her child’s education and the state’s right to determine how to measure learning?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I know a lot of people who would have been retained in grade 3, because they struggled with reading. These students weren’t deterred from reading, and are avid readers now, because they were NOT RETAINED in grade 3. This test and punishment model totally goes against what we know about learning.
I’d like to retain Congress from any pass.
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I was under the impression that districts could choose what the consequence would be for not participating in the test. Some Floridan districts do not hold children back in 3rd grade and some do. However, from the posts here, they read as if Florida law requires all districts to hold children back in 3rd grade for not participating in the test.
Could someone clarify for me please?
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I would like to see a response to The Morrigan, but would also like to add that the writer, Diane Ravitch, assumes that the test is “objective” when it is anything but. Countless stories from parents and students indicate that the testing is often convoluted and agenda driven, and are graded by hired help, sometimes employing teens. These are false choices, further limit the notion of parental freedom to educate their children in the way they see fit without heavy handed government oversight. In fact there are more testing options available that should be explored such as paper testing vs. computerized testing or giving more weight to the report card and less to the end of the year testing.
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Robomom,
You haven’t been reading here very long. I assume nothing of the kind
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Robomom,
No test ever is “objective”. Diane understands that even though I haven’t been able to “break/cure”-ha ha-her of the mis-usage of the term measure (You know this had to be coming, Diane, eh!!) such as this statement:
“Is a report card based on a year’s worth of work a better measure of a student’s knowledge, or is an objective test the proper measure?”
Substitute assessment, judgement, gauge for measure and I have no problem with the statement.
Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement (notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”):
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume, we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Now since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable” which is what all this standardized testing insanity, truly insanity if you think about it, is about???
So much harm to so many students is caused by the educational malpractices that are standards and testing or as Phelps contends in “measuring the nonobservable”.
How insane is this all???
Utterly beyond my comprehension!!!
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The question raised in the Florida case, whether a year’s worth of classroom/homework is a better measure of a student’s performance than this one test (FSA) is not just a philosophical question. It is also a scientific question, and the state officials should be held accountable to prove that the FSA is 1) a valid and reliable measure of student progress, and 2) more reliable than an entire year of classroom/homework data. It is patently unscientific to assume you are measuring a variable (latent or not) without sufficient evidence. I hope the parents have expert witnesses from the area of testing and measurement to support them. Jeb! again reveals his ineptitude and the potential harm to children is serious.
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ON MEASURING LEARNING, and to support Ravich and Swacker’s notes, first, another way to express what they might MEAN by “measure,” is “to give an intelligible, verifiable, and reasonable account” (to those who haven’t abandoned their own intelligence and reasonableness–[did I say that?]).
Second, but really, folks, and FWIW, here is a take on measuring and human beings, and human development, AKA education, from the philosopher, Bernard Lonergan in his (massive) “Insight: A Study of Human Understanding” (2000/Collection 3/pages 488-490).
QUOTED with brief comments: “Our first observation must be negative. The extraordinary success of the physical sciences naturally enough led investigators of the organism, the psyche, and intelligence to a servile rather than an intelligent adoption of successful procedures. In physics and chemistry, measuring is a basic technique that takes inquiry from the relation of things to our senses, to their relations to one another. But when one mounts to the higher integrations of the organisms, the psyche, and intelligence, one finds that measuring loses both in significance and in efficacy. . . .” (Much more here, but I will select for this blog.)
“It loses its significance, for the higher integration is, within limits, independent of the exact quantities of the lower manifold it systematizes. Moreover, the higher the integration, the greater the independence of lower quantities, so that the meaning of one’s dreams is not a function of one’s weight, and one’s ability in mathematics does not vary with one’s height.”
“Besides this loss in significance, there is also a loss in efficacy. Classical method can select among the functions that solve differential equations by appealing to measurements and empirically established curves. What the differential equation is to classical method, the general notion of development is to genetic method.” (ME: Genetic here, then, refers to the science of development and not to the study of genes). “But while the differential equation is mathematical, the general notion of development is not” (ME: and so doesn’t follow numerically-base measuring). “It follows that, while measurement is an efficacious technique for finding boundary conditions that restrict differential equations, it possesses no assignable efficacy when it comes to particularizing the general notion of development” (ME: or by inference human beings who are much more complex and whose higher orders of psyche and intelligence have different, and much more variable, schemes of recurrence as developmental. Further, and if that doesn’t do it,
“Regular physical events are apt to recur in some single determinate scheme. But organic, psychic, and intellectual events are recurrent, not in single schemes, but in flexible circles of ranges of schemes. Nor is that all. There is the fact of development.” (ME: development occurs differently in, is interactive with, and occurs across all schemes and ranges.)
“Concomitantly the flexible circle of schemes of recurrence both shifts and expands. Operations that initially were impossible or extremely awkward and inefficient become possible, spontaneous, economical, rapid and effective. . . . The physicist must” (he gives analogy) . . . . “Similarly, the biologist, the psychologist, and the intellectual theorist have to operate not only in the light of a general notion of development but also in accord with more specialized directives.”
ME: Much more here, but you get the drift: a good number of those who think they know what’s better (bless their hearts; after all, they are following scientific procedures–but unfortunately, also their data frame–that is, natural and physical data), and who have power to set policy for the rest of us, along with many scientists, are laboring under a set of bad and limiting ideas. In other language, they are thinking with a bad paradigm concerning science where “science” doesn’t mean method, but rather means natural and physical data ONLY; and so “scientific” in this thinking leaves out human data and the quite-different aspects of the science of development as applied to human beings and, in this case, education, testing and assessments. A grand oversight deposited (and exacerbated in its blow-back to us) in this century from the last two. Catherine
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