No wonder Jeb Bush wrote an opinion article defending his so-called reforms, especially high-stakes standardized testing.
The Republican-controlled Legislature is moving to dismantle the structure that Bush created when he was governor. Some legislators wanted to cancel recess but the outcry from parents made them drop that idea.
Leslie Postal of The Orlando Sentinel, one of the best education writers in the nation, writes here about the seismic changes in Florida:
The Florida Senate backed away Tuesday from plans to end the state’s recess requirement after objections from “recess moms” but moved ahead with proposals to scrap key, and controversial, parts of the Republican education agenda.
The Senate’s fiscal policy committee agreed by an 18-0 vote to end policies ushered in by former Gov. Jeb Bush more than 20 years ago. Those include requirements that high school students pass two exams to graduate and that third graders pass a reading test to move on to fourth grade.
Under the bill approved by the GOP-dominated committee, students would no longer have to pass an Algebra 1 and a language arts exam to earn high school diplomas. But the 10th-grade language arts exam would count as 30% of a student’s final grade in 10th-grade English classes, just as the algebra exam already counts as 30% of the final grade in Algebra 1 classes.
The bill also would allow third graders who failed the state reading test to be promoted to fourth grade, if that is what their parents thought was best.
Jeb Bush’s allies objected to the changes and said they would water down standards. It’s not yet clear whether DeSantis will go along. Moms for Liberty also objected.
But Republicans in the Senate have pushed and supported the measures, and two committees have now approved them.
Senate President Senate President Kathleen Passidomo introduced the proposals in a memo she sent to senators last month that was titled “Learn Local – Cutting Red Tape, Supporting Neighborhood Public Schools.”
The idea, she said, was that after the Legislature expanded school choice (HB 1) earlier this year, making many more children eligible for private school scholarships, it should look in its 2024 session to remove regulations on public schools, which serve the bulk of the state’s students.
In the memo, she called the ideas “bold,” “controversial” and, she conceded, ones that might “not make it across the finish line.”
Many of the Senate’s suggestions have broad support from school superintendents, administrators, teachers and parents.
Representatives from the Broward, Orange and Seminole county school districts all showed their support Tuesday, for example.
Simon noted that Florida’s new standardized test, FAST, is a “progress-monitoring” exam given several times a year starting in pre-Kindergarten.
“We’re able to find those students much earlier on in the process,” he said, making the current third-grade rule unnecessary.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Kill the testing….but they still have testing? Talking in circles. Gates won and Jeb lost, meaning it will be testing all the time via computer learning programs. NOT a win for students and teachers.
parseltongue
Test and punish has never worked, and standards and scores are often used to shuffle struggling students to “off the grid” private schools with zero accountability. Vulnerable students are far better off in public schools where there are trained professionals that can address their needs. Florida may have improved graduation rates, but it is more of sleight of hand than improvement. Widespread privatization has allowed Florida to move large numbers of struggling students off their accountability rolls. As a result, the graduation rates improved under test and punish. It’s more Florida smoke and mirrors from callous, dishonest leadership.
so are they saying now they are “more conservative?” More conservative than the Bush miracle? this is from Birnholz at AEI. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Progress-Monitoring-in-Florida-A-New-Solution-to-an-Old-Education-Problem.pdf?x91208
The article appears to present student grades as being subjective, and I suspect that a small percentage of a grade may be due to how a teacher views a student. Yet, research indicates that a student’s GPA is a higher predictor of success in college than standardized test scores. Most teachers’ grades must reflect some type of objective criteria, or they would not be such a strong predictor of future academic performance. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2020/01/29/its-gpas-not-standardized-tests-that-predict-college-success/?sh=638491f832bd
“Most teachers’ grades must reflect some type of objective criteria,”
No grades “reflect any type of objective criteria.”
Duane
I am a teacher of introductory Japanese. I am teaching my students to write the 46 hiragana (one of several Japanese writing systems). My students are not hearing impaired. I give them a test in which each hiragana is pronounced three times, and its Romanized version is displayed. The students are given ample time to respond. They have to write each hiragana character. You actually think that this is not an objective test of their knowledge of hiragana? Of course it is. It is a valid and objective test of this knowledge.
Other research shows the opposite: that SAT/ACT scores predict college success better than GPA. And I’m aware of no research disputing that SAT scores and GPA together are better predictors of college success than GPA alone. Which makes perfect sense.
Yeah, there is contradictory research on this question.
However, college is a big tent. Someone going to Indiana University to play volleyball and major in Physical Education so that she can be a high-school volleyball coach is different from someone who plans on getting a PhD in mathematics. The one-size-fits-all nature of the Common Core and of the SAT testing (among many other reasons) makes both absurd. People differ. If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, . . .
I often think, as a paradigmatic case, of a particular student of mine who was not a brilliant scholar (in fact, she struggled quite a bit and had difficulty passing the state tests) who was nonetheless, in my estimation, a genius. She was breathtakingly popular. She made friends easily. She was a natural born leader among her peers. She was universally liked. She was great at settling disputes among those peers. She led her sports team (I am going to try to avoid identifying info here) to a state championship. An exceptional human, but not in the ways that school was expecting her to be.
KIDS DIFFER. The stupid standards and tests do not. They are Procrustean beds. And you remember how gruesome that story got.
Over the years, with some exceptions, I’ve slowly come around to the position that these mandatory state standardized tests of K-12 students starting at grade 3 are not a good idea. But I continue to think the SAT/ACT have value in college admissions, especially at top-ranked schools, given how insanely large the applicant pools are at such schools and how much grade inflation has been happening in the last twenty years. I realize I’m in a small minority on that among commenters here.
RT — Decades ago, when I was an instructor of English Comp at a the university where I was getting my PhD, I had a student who was just awful on several levels. Just an obnoxious, terrible human being. She handed in a paper that was clearly full of plagiarized passages, which I quickly established using Google (which had been in existence for just a couple years). I nailed her to the wall—she got an F in the course. Would I have done that if it had been one of the students that I was quite fond of? I doubt it. That F was, in at least some sense, subjective.
Fair point, Bob, and that’s why colleges should have some flexibility in admissions.
AEI per bias check scores halfway between right-center & extreme right wing. Their article continues the mantra that teacher grades mean nothing compared to state-stdzd testing. [They claim FL state-stdzd test scores align with NAEP– love to see the supporting details…] And what they are celebrating here boils down to re-branding unofficial periodic pre-testing for the high-stakes FSA as “FAST”– still high-stakes.
FAST will be used to rank, sort and privatize. It will remain high stakes.
Jeb Bush fighting Republicans is fun to watch. It’s fun, but it’s also sad because the Bush family suffers from severe mental health issues.
It’s also downright depressing because the Bush family is a big reason Donald Trump dominates the formerly grand Old Party.
It’s really embarrassing when some reporter goes to get George Jr’s take on contemporary issues. One gets a quick reminder of how cognitively impaired this guy is.
So, 20+ yrs after NCLB, one of its many issues is addressed– that end-of-yr high stakes tests do not in fact help any teacher tweak their pedagogy to align better with tests in order to boost scores. Now all of those periodic unofficial “test-prep” tests are re-branded as… official high stakes tests! Whee!
Exactly. They are useless.
Worse than useless because they lead to pedagogy and curricula based on the idiotic Gates/Coleman standards that the tests supposedly but in fact do not validly measure.
FL comes out with. “better/best/fastest”. educational achievement tests for the “Highest of High Standards” to push the schools into high gear. Thomas Cannan in his book “perfectionishm” indicates how this high stakes testing architecture is a part of the “hologram of perfectionism ” that we live in with extreme competition.
” For at least 70 years, demanding more phonics has become a shibboleth among those who see, or want to see, reading as essentially a readily taught technical skill. We’ve been fiddling with phonics ever since, while more consequential societal factors burn brightly in the background.”
Perspective | On the latest obsession with phonics
WASHINGTONPOST.COM
Perspective | On the latest obsession with phonics
Three reading experts challenge the current education orthodoxy about phonics instruction.
All reactions:5Andrea Watson and 4 others
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Jim Baker
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“Education and the 2024 election” by Peter Green Cumudgucation
“When Glen Youngkin won the Virginia governorship, election strategists thought that they’d just seen a successful field test of education and parental rights as a campaign strategy. But that was 2021, and the bloom is off that rose.
Moms For Liberty was supposed to energize boots on the ground and build grassroots coalitions that would lift Republicans into office up and down the ballot. But their results in 2023 elections were lackluster (and probably even worse than reported, because they had backed away from endorsing many candidates aligned with their group, perhaps already sensing that the group was becoming a liability).
Ron DeSantis, like Jeb Bush before him, was angling to ride Florida school reform all the way to the White House. That appears unlikely.
Public education has never been a major feature of Presidential races. The closest we’ve come in recent memory was the 2016 stampede away from Common Core. Do not expect education to get more than the occasional cursory head nod in the 2024 race.”
sorry so much “garbage” got copied in here; I have had the flu for a week but wanted to get Peter Green’s article attached and the reference to Curran’s book.
Jean Sanders, I fixed it. Get well soon!
cx CURRAN (author) PERFECTIONISM
students are NOT widgets and cannot be transformed into “perfect workers”. ” an expert on the psychology of perfectionism, Tom Curran links perfectionism to the pressure to succeed, noting that “Perfectionism is not a personal obsession—it’s a decidedly cultural one” . He links “the pressure to be perfect” to growing inequality. Growing up in a consumerist culture where he felt shame about not having “stuff,” he says of his own perfectionist tendencies: “I was overcompensating for that upbringing all the way through my young adult years where I was constantly trying to lift myself above other people, trying as hard as I can not to let that background define me and try to, I guess, elevate myself out of that. Curran’s research singles out two key characteristics of perfectionists that can make it difficult to succeed—relative to our culture: first, perfectionists “work unsustainably hard” ( “Workaholism”); and, second, they are “world-class self-sabotagers.” If “[t]heir efforts fell off a cliff because what they were doing is they were trying to preserve their sense of self-esteem by withdrawing themselves from the activity… knowing that the anticipated guilt, shame and embarrassment of that initial failure was so fierce that they simply did not want to experience it again. Curran’s research on perfectionism as a cultural phenomeno– rather than viewing perfectionism as a personality trait or personal obsession, the current competitive culture itself may be creating a feedback loop of overwork and failure. .”