Florida waives school testing rules

Students to graduate, advance this year regardless of results

Florida this year will allow high school seniors to graduate, third graders to be promoted and middle school and high school students to earn grades in certain courses even if they skip state exams or do poorly on them, Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran ruled in an order signed Friday.

Parents and educators have been clamoring for the state to take such action. Because of the pandemic, more than 30% of Florida’s public school students are studying online from home. Many of their parents are upset the state wants to bring them in for testing.

Others argue even students on campus have faced disruptions and hardships this year, and highstakes testing doesn’t make sense.

“It’s a huge relief. It’s all I’ve been worried about for the last however long,” said Orlando parent Judi Hayes, who has sons in third and seventh grade. She read the order as soon as her school board member emailed it to her.

The news brought “almost like an audible cheer across town,” she said.

Hayes’ younger son has Down syndrome and so is at higher risk of complications should he contract COVID-19. Because of those health concerns, Hayes said both of her sons have been doing school online all school year.

Like other parents, she was upset when school officials said her seventh grader was expected, by state law, to test in person.

“I kept saying, ‘you can’t force me to send my kid to school when he’s been home all year,’ ” she said.

On Facebook groups, in interviews and in a state survey, many parents shared similar views, calling high-stakes testing in the middle of a pandemic “ridiculous,” “not fair” and a potential way to spread COVID-19.

Corcoran, who has said he wanted all students, if possible, to test this year, conceded in his order

that fewer youngsters likely would sit for the exams this spring than in the past. Testing began Monday.

His order said that “each student has individualized circumstances and challenges caused by the pandemic” and that “local school districts, in consultation with parents, are in the best position to evaluate the academic progress of each student and then to make individualized decisions related to student progression and graduation in keeping with the best interest of each child.”

His order waives three key testing rules for 2021: one that demands third graders, with some exceptions, pass the state reading test to move onto fourth grade; another that requires 12th graders to pass the state’s algebra 1 exam and its 10th-grade language arts exam to earn a diploma; and a third that counts scores on state exams in certain middle and high school courses — algebra, biology, civics, geometry and U.S. history — for 30% of final class grades.

This year, school districts will be able to make promotion, graduation and grade decisions “at the local level,” based on classwork and district tests, said Jacob Oliva, chancellor of K-12 education for the Florida Department of Education on a call with superintendents Friday.

Superintendents and school board members had also urged the state to waive the consequences of testing for this year and to drop A-to-F school grades for 2021.

Corcoran’s order says the state will not issue school grades unless a school district asks to “opt in” to that process.

The new order “puts the needs of our students, teachers, families and schools first in this most unpreceded school year,” said Walt Griffin, Seminole County’s superintendent, in a text. “Sincere thanks to our Commissioner for listening.”

Griffin wrote to Corcoran in October, asking him to drop school grades for the 2020-21 school year.

School leaders in Orange County also had urged the commissioner to drop testing consequences.

“I’m so grateful, I’m so relieved,” said Teresa Jacobs, chair of the Orange County School Board.

“With testing started, it was really weighing heavily on me,” Jacobs said. “We had parents in such untenable situations.”

OCPS wasn’t “looking for a way to just pass our kids through the system,” Jacobs said. “This wasn’t a hall pass,” she added, but about being considerate of the challenges students and families faced this year.

“We’re still going to be looking at, ‘Did these children learn what they needed to learn?’ ” Jacobs said.

If they didn’t, OCPS and other local school districts are planning more intensive summer school offerings to help them and perhaps extra classes next school year.

Florida’s statewide teachers union also praised the order but conditionally. “The new order lifts a heavy burden from our students. It’s only right that they should be exempt from dire consequences when they take standardized tests this spring,” said Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, in a statement.

But Spar noted the order still allows student test scores to be used in teacher evaluations this year, and so the state will “impose very real costs” on teachers, Spar said.

“The educators who have served Florida’s students throughout the pandemic also deserve to be shown some grace.”

The state canceled its annual battery of standardized tests — both the Florida Standards Assessments, or FSA, its state science tests and its end-of-course exams — last spring when public schools shut down because of the pandemic.

But when schools opened in August, testing resumed, though the number of exams given in the fall and winter is typically dwarfed by those taken in the spring, and it’s the spring exam scores that play key roles in many academic decisions.

Corcoran and his staff said testing could be done safely on campus — and state law does not allow for testing from students’ homes — and said the exams would provide important information about what students had learned, or failed to grasp, in a school year upended by the pandemic.

But he also said he would use “compassion and grace” in deciding how to use the scores.

The order also provides an extension of the Bright Futures scholarship deadlines, giving more time to seniors who need to earn qualifying scores on the ACT or SAT.

They will now have until Dec. 1 instead of June 30 to secure those scores to earn the college scholarships.