TAMPA, Fla. — The Florida Department of Education has said its new testing model is the first in the nation to use progress monitoring instead of traditional testing.
It’s called the Florida Assessment of Student Thinking, also known as FAST.
Previously, there was just a single assessment students would take in the spring. Now with FAST, there are multiple tests.
“Students are being assessed 3 times throughout the school year, and then that final assessment is really the culminating one. It’s a little bit longer of a test, and it’s really to see where students are in the year, and that’s the one that goes towards calculating school grades,” said Christopher Redding, Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Florida.
The Florida DOE released the first batch of school grades under this new system last month. And with those results, came some lower grades for Hillsborough County.
After the grades were released, Hillsborough County School Board member Nadia Combs told ABC Action News she wasn’t surprised by the grades.
“People have to remember our schools are doing a great job, but at the end of the day, this is a new test, new standards, new evaluation, and it’s not really looking at the growth of students, just showing the performance,” said Nadia Combs.
Redding believes this new format is having an impact on school grades, and recent results have shown just how much the COVID-19 pandemic affected students’ abilities to learn.
“We know from broader research that the pandemic has had a disruption on students’ learning opportunities, and now those are probably trickling into grades in a way that wouldn’t have been present if it weren’t for these pandemic-related disruptions,” said Redding.
The results highlighted lower graduation rates as well.
“So one portion of school grades for high schools in particular is the graduation rate. For what’s included in the grades that were just released is the graduation from the 2021-2022 school year, the first year in which graduation rates did decline in the state, in, I think, close to 2 decades,” said Redding.
“For students now who are being tested in 3rd grade, so then for the elementary schools and their grades, this is that first group of students that was at home for the last part of their kindergarten year,” he added.
As we enter the last half of the school year, education researchers said they’re reviewing the data closely to find out how it can be used to help students learn better moving forward.
“I generally urge families, the public, to take school grades with a grain of salt. I think we know the there’s so much more than what makes a school other than what comes down to just the percentage of students that were proficient,” said Redding.
“Again if we’re just looking at proficiency rates alone for a large portion of school grades, these tend to be highly correlated with socioeconomic status of students attending particular schools,” he added.
