Governor Ron DeSantis has decided to drop standardized testing and replace it with “progress monitoring.”
The devil is in the details. How will the state monitor “progress” without standardized testing? Is he trying to hide the poor performance of charter schools?
Florida blogger Billy Townsend explains what’s happening here. He says Ron is ditching Jeb.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
truer words never spoken: The Devil Is In The Details
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It remains to be seen how all the testing changes play out. Perhaps DeSantis is trying to pump up his lagging poll numbers from his disastrous Covid response so he is trying to throw a bone to Florida’s parents. Since DeSantis has done nothing for public education other than try to undermine it, I remain a skeptic of anything this “Putinesque” politician proposes.
So-called accountability is not going to disappear. The letter grade designation for schools and districts will remain. Townsend reveals how the state already has a game plan that works to the disadvantage of public schools. My hope is this change will not require students to spend more time online and that teachers will be able to spend more time teaching more than just math and reading.
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Do you guess Machiavelli is shaking his head right now?
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He should use the NWEA test (adjusted for FL standards) instead of inventing his own
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Why?
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Sounds like he’s just re-naming the same old junk.
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Progress is apparently the new word for achievement. Dumb.
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When it comes to Traitor Trump’s Republicans the devil is writing the details.
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Townsend’s analysis is a depth look at Florida politics. Interesting read. He seems to feel this is a time to grab some anti-test initiative.
Unlike Townsend, I wonder if this is a bait and switch that DeSantis is trying to pull off. Progress monitoring sounds to me like a prelude to students sitting in front of screens monitored by underpaid aides. Perhaps his exultation was premature. He seems to think that DeSantis is trying to push attention away from the California rejection of DeSantis anti-vax rhetoric. Perhaps so, but I suspect that Townsend and my cousins who live down there in Polk County with him might just be the only living and breathing Floridians who care about California. I could be wrong, of course. Politicians have a bad news/image allergy that makes them run for the media epi-pen at the drop of a hat.
What I suspect from this is that someone near DeSantis is poised to make a bundle changing the modus vivendi from high stakes testing to progress monitoring in a way that will leave people feeling relief. They should really be searching for the money and where it flows. Maybe a friend has a company that sells the software to do this monitoring. I bet there is more money in giving tests all the time than there is in giving them once a year.
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The Devil is in DeSantis
The details might be difficult
But Devil is in DeSantis
And dangerous DeSantis cult
Is evil Praying Mantis
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DeSatanist
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I’m my New York State middle school, we’ve done away with all final exams save for a couple of 8th grade regents exams. We use the NWEA. New district and building admin is pushing for much less HW (wasn’t much before, to be honest)…emphasis is on social/emotional work (RULER, which most students and teachers dread) but district still touting their high academic standards and achievement…seems like an attempt to make very vocal parents happy. Number of designated special education students has been skyrocketing in recent years. Push to incorporate more tech has, IMHO, lowered student achievement and “grit”…my students were capable of so much more before this shift, and there was a lot more joy in our school. A very weird and sad change in priorities that is resulting in “snowflake” students.
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What is SEL but amateur therapy and third rate self-help? It seems like worthless junk to me. We use the horrid Choose Love curriculum. School is becoming an big therapy session for the alleged trauma that haunts all students. Meanwhile China teaches actual subjects to its youth.
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The “Choose Love” curriculum?
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A typical Choose Love lesson:
“Let It Go”
“What you will write on this note card will be private. It should represent the things that you need to let go of….the hurt, anger, sorrow, pain, disappointments, grudges, resentments….the mistreatments or wrongdoings by others to you. Write down one, two or more statements, people or ideas that you are holding onto in anger or frustration or resentment.”
Now I want you to take that notecard and rip it into as many pieces as you’d like. With each rip I want you to repeat the phrase, ‘I am letting go of my anger and frustrations. I have the ability to choose how I respond.’”
Are activities like these beneficial? Is there proof? Have they been tested out? As far as I can tell most of these lessons were written by a a grieving Sandy Hook mom with no special training,in psychology or education, but apparently well-versed in self-help books and evangelical Christianity (several of the lessons are overtly Christian). Do they open up closed wounds and thereby harm students? Should they be delivered first thing in the morning in a large class by a history teacher with no training in psychotherapy?
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Sounds like an exercise from a Tony Robbins seminar.
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I bought a book earlier this year about diagramming sentences. At about the same time, I did a web search regarding SEL effectiveness. What I found, all I found was R&D that claimed SEL provided an 11 to 1 return on investment. That was a head scratcher at first. What does ROI have to do with learning? I soon interpreted the R&D to mean that if tech companies offered grants getting teachers to give students warm and fuzzy feelings while using online products during the pandemic, the tech companies would supposedly, eventually reap eleven times their investment in consumer brand loyalty. Of course, the real social learning and emotional development takes place when students are at school having face to face interactions with classmates and teachers, just like we used to before the hostile tech takeover. Follow the money.
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Ponderosa wrote– “Are [SEL] activities like these beneficial? … Should they be delivered first thing in the morning in a large class by a history teacher with no training in psychotherapy?”
No! Like in China, the history teacher should be teaching history. Good history teachers include examples of people overcoming difficulties, when appropriate (meaning aligned with the curriculum) but they the teachers should be the decision makers here.
But I don’t think history teachers have to worry about SEL. Most schools simply reduce frills like music and art to make room for this stuff.
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Whoa, Silver! I’ve seen this scheme before. It’s called CBE, competency-based education, tacitly if not officially endorsed by the Secretary Cardona Department of Education, and it is NOT the end of testing. Quite the opposite. Cardona’s home state of Connecticut is the model they’re using. That’s why Biden picked him out of nowhere. Saying the devil’s in the details is laudably polite. It’s harsher and more accurate to say this is another NCLB on steroids moment.
Follow the money. Follow the data that will be monetized. It’s not Republicans or Democrats. It’s Wall Street and Silicon Valley in charge. By giving short, frequent, online tests all year long instead of once a year, more data will be created. Do you smell him yet? Bill Gates is nigh and his grubby fingers are in Florida’s pie. Here in Los Angeles, the constant tests I must administer are sold by Renaissance. Teachers do not receive meaningful feedback; we get inauthentic numbers from the tests. The district gets more reasons to push more meaningless test prep. And merit pay always lurks underneath the façade of CBE. And privatization always lurks under the façade of CBE.
The corporate goal is to have every young person looking at a screen and clicking. At all
times. Wade through all the Owellian corporate word soup about measuring achievement/success, and you’re left with one simple fact: There will be more testing, not less. I’ll say it again, there will be more testing in Florida than ever before. Count on Governor Desantis to destroy, not buttress public education. Don’t wait for the chickens to hatch, count on it.
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“It’s harsher and more accurate to say this is another NCLB on steroids moment.”
Yep! The standards and testing malpractice regime on hyper steroids and meth!
Noel Wilson warned us in 1997 about this shit, and it is stinky, smelly, pathogen laden shit that is very harmful to the students.
Sad, indeed very effin sad.
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I don’t even oppose standardized testing and I could see people were turning against it.
The proponents never really made the case for it. There were more and more complaints and they just ignored them or, worse, accused anyone who opposed it of “not wanting to hear the truth” or “avoiding accountability”.
Other than to compare groups of students – the civil rights justification- they never showed us how or why the tests were valuable or useful and they either ignored or shut down any criticism of the tests.
Unfortunately I think the DeSantis plan will be just be constant online testing- one long standardized test as course content. The cure is worse then the disease. I hope public school students in Florida enjoy a full school day clicking through test after test after test, because that’s what their courses will be like.
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It’ll be interesting to see if ed reform can come up with anything other than standardized tests as their contribution to public school students.
They don’t have anything else to offer public school students. The “movement” consists of “accountability” and “choice”. What that means for PUBLIC school students is “standardized tests”. Without that there’s no reason to bother with them at all.
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Governor DeSatan is set to replace standardized testing with progress monitoring, which is like–you guessed it!–standardized testing.
The way he replaced the Common Core State Standards with the Flor-uh-duh B.E.S.T. standards, which are Return of the Common Core: the Sequel.
This is all politics. He wants to throw red meet to the anti-government Trump base, and this is part of it. He can say he did away with standardized testing and the Common Core without actually having done either–i.e., without having made a change that dealt with the central problems with each.
He’s slicker than Jabba the Trump–gotta give him that–but equally amoral.
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cx: meat, ofc!
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I interviewed with a school administrator in Royalton, Vermont, this summer who continually asked me how I would “progressmonitor” my students. Can we look forward, in the wake of Governor DeSantis’ announcement, that this ungainly portmanteau will enter the vernacular? God, I hope not.
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Is anyone monitoring DeSadist’s “progress”?
Seems like all you need is the negative numbers . Or maybe the imaginary numbers.
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I would say that by any rational measure, he is making significant progress toward becoming a full-blown fascist.
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DeSantis is simply misusing progress monitoring to pretend he’s eliminating yearly standardized testing. The ed reformers don’t have a clue about assessment. They cynically adopt education phrases they learned polls well from Frank Luntz & corrupt it for their privatization agenda.
Progress monitoring has been used in special education for decades to identify specific skill gaps in students who have disabilities. In SPED circles it’s referred to a curriculum based measurement (CBM). We use short informal assessments adapt instruction for individual or small groups of students. There are some commercially developed CBMs available that have good reliability and validity when used correctly.
There’s no way any of these Republicans reformers will use CBMs correctly. They are literally starving public schools out of existence. It’s the fun part of drowning the baby in the bathtub for these guys.
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Frank Luntz (not Fran)
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