State study on school exams asked the wrong question
Florida’s parents want to know how well their kids are going to be able to compete with their peers nationally and internationally.
The state’s taxpayers want to know if state budget dollars are being used to support an education system that prepares students for success in a globalized world.
The most transparent way to provide this information to parents and taxpayers is for the state’s schools to use an assessment system in which Florida’s results can be readily compared to those of other states. At the high-school level, that means using the SAT and ACT exams, which are each taken by about 2 million students around the nation each year, instead of the Florida Standards Assessment exams.
That message hasn’t reached Florida’s educational leaders. As the Sentinel reported last week, the state spent more than $420,000 to study the possibility of using either the SAT or ACT. At first blush, the report seemed to discourage such a replacement.
But the Legislature, which authorized the study as part of the behemoth education reform bill, began the study by asking the wrong question. What the Legislature should have asked is whether it would be feasible to replace the existing high-schoollevel FSA exams in math and English language arts with the SAT or ACT. The key issue in such a study would have been whether the U.S. Department of Education would allow Florida to replace the high-school FSA exams with the SAT or ACT under the new federal K-12 education law, called the Every Student Succeeds Act.
If the experts performing the study had explored this question, they would have reported that of the 15 states that have already had their K-12 plans approved by the U.S. Department of Education under ESSA, five (Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine and Michigan) are being allowed to use the SAT for assessing math and English language arts at the high-school level. Another ESSA-approved state, Louisiana, is using the ACT. In yet another ESSA-approved state, North Dakota, students have the option of using either the ACT or SAT or two other exams.
But the Legislature asked whether individual districts should be allowed to replace the high-school-level FSA exams with the ACT or SAT. The experts concluded what any of us would conclude: Such a system in which different districts chose different exams would make it impossible to compare districts and would take some of the sting out of Florida’s school-grading scheme.
Like every other state, Florida has its own academic standards, and no national test — including the ACT and SAT — covers every single state standard. The experts argued that this lack of “alignment” between the ACT and SAT and our state’s standards would keep the U.S. Department of Education from approving Florida’s ESSA plan. But somehow Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan and North Dakota navigated this issue successfully to ESSA approval. It’s likely that Florida could have as well.
Among the students in Florida’s 2017 high-school graduating class, 73 percent had taken the ACT and 83 percent had taken the SAT. Requiring Florida’s highschool students to take additional state-specific tests is an obvious case of duplicative assessment. It wastes the time of students and teachers, as well as scarce state and local budget resources.