DeSantis calls for an end to annual spring testing in Florida public schools

Looks like DeSantis is doing something right for change. He is moving the Florida school system towards the "Finnish Model" which I mentioned earlier in another thread.

+1 for DeSantis. I want to like him because I think he has potential to go all the way to the top, but I just which he'd drop all the populist nonsense and attempts to imitate Trump.

DeSantis calls for an end to annual spring testing in Florida public schools
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article254230563.html
Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday called on lawmakers to revamp the state’s school accountability system by eliminating several of the annual exams students take and replacing them with shorter student “progress monitoring” reports, which are tailored to individual students and already given throughout the school year.


About standardized testing

Do Standardized Tests Improve Education in America?
https://standardizedtests.procon.org/
Standardized tests have been a part of American education since the mid-1800s. Their use skyrocketed after 2002’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) mandated annual testing in all 50 states. US students slipped from being ranked 18th in the world in math in 2000 to 40th in 2015, and from 14th to 25th in science and from 15th to 24th in reading. Failures in the education system have been blamed on rising poverty levels, teacher quality, tenure policies, and, increasingly, on the pervasive use of standardized tests.

Proponents argue that standardized tests offer an objective measurement of education and a good metric to gauge areas for improvement, as well as offer meaningful data to help students in marginalized groups, and that the scores are good indicators of college and job success. They argue standardized tests are useful metrics for teacher evaluations.

Opponents argue that standardized tests only determine which students are good at taking tests, offer no meaningful measure of progress, and have not improved student performance, and that the tests are racist, classist, and sexist, with scores that are not predictors of future success. They argue standardized tests are useful metrics for teacher evaluations.

 

Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?
The country’s achievements in education have other nations, especially the United States, doing their homework
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/inno...ardized,Finland's schools are publicly funded.
There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town. The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

 

No tests... no evaluations... hmmm.. So the really brilliant kid may end up a forklift operator and the substandard kid may end up doing heart surgery. Good plan.

 

No, the brilliant kid goes on to graduate from top of his class in med / law school. Your reasoning makes no sense, which is no surprise given your posting history.

 

This is going to be a tough thread for Righties to comment. We've had other threads that decried the loss of testing as ridiculous - but now it is DeSantis doing away with them.

 

I think "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001" was a sincere effort to improve the education system in US, but it only made it worse. Its good that people look to other countries and learn what the other alternatives are out there and see if they can be implemented here. After all, education is the pathway to solving other issues like crime, poverty, drug use, unplanned pregnancies, and dependency to welfare.

 

You're preaching to the choir! I'll be interested to read the posts supporting your ideas of America looking to other countries for solutions on crime and unplanned pregnancies.

 

Sounds like students will be tested 3 times a year now to grade where they stand at these fundamental skills. So long as we do not grade based off of "feels" like they do in California in order to shoe horn in more minorities, than I'm fine with it.

 

We talked about unplanned pregnancies on the thread about Texas abortion bans. I am ok having States decide for themselves, but a ban is far less effective in reducing abortions than reducing unplanned pregnancies in the first place, which can be done by making contraceptives more available, and by education. Also, educated people are less likely to have abortions than uneducated poor people, so in that sense improved education system/approach contributes to it too.

 

By "feel" so you mean tutoring kids who struggle? That is actually another aspect of the "Finnish Model". The teachers will do whatever it takes to bring struggling kids up to speed.

 

Good for DeSantis! He cares about the education of Florida youth, unlike these thieves:

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Maspeth HS diplomas ‘not worth the paper’ they’re printed on.

What a crime. Now these young people are supposed to go out into the workforce with this view of reality?

"We’re really seeing just how little public schools have to do with learning. And how little they care."

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/474938/

 

Maybe the founding fathers were correct in not having the federal government involved in education. Educating youngsters is not a legitimate function of a federal government.

Good to see DeSantis exploring options.

 

"Government education" is probably an oxymoron.

"Almost 2,400 North Carolina elementary school teachers have failed the math portion of their licensing exams, which puts their careers in jeopardy, since the state hired Pearson publishing company to give the exam in 2013, according to a report presented to the state Board of Education Wednesday.

Failure rates have spiked as schools around the state struggle to find teachers for the youngest children. Education officials are now echoing what frustrated teachers have been saying: The problem may lie with the exams rather than the educators.

Teachers in Florida and Indiana have also seen mass failures when their states adopted Pearson testing, according to news reports from those states."
CHARLOTTE OBSERVER, Hundreds of NC teachers are flunking math exams. It may not be their fault., BY ANN DOSS HELMS,
August 01, 2018.
https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/education/article215848065.html