You Should Know:
- Florida eliminating FSA testing
- FSA will be administered for the last time this spring
- Progress monitoring to being in 2022-2023 school year
- F.A.S.T. (Florida Assessment of Student Thinking) testing replacing FSA
- F.A.S.T. will take place three times a year
Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law on Tuesday that ends Florida Standards Assessments (FSA) testing.
"Today we come not to praise the FSA but to bury it," Gov. DeSantis said during his press conference at St. Petersburg Collegiate High School.
The FSA, according to the governor, will be replaced with the Florida Assessment of Student Thinking (F.A.S.T.). The governor said the F.A.S.T. will take place three times a year with tests that will take hours versus days, and added that it will monitor student progress and foster individual growth.
Just as Gov. DeSantis announced in September, the 2021-2022 school year will be the last time the FSA is administered in the state of Florida.
"Next year, Florida will become the first state in the nation to do a full transition to progress monitoring to inform school accountability," Gov. DeSantis said. "The 2022-2023 school year will serve as a new baseline for school accountability..... and school grades will resume the following year."
Florida Education Association (FEA) President Andrew Spar released the following statement on the announcement:
"When the governor said he was reducing testing, teachers and parents saw a real opportunity to fix what’s wrong with how Florida assesses students. We imagined better outcomes for kids. This bill does not reduce testing but increases it. The bill does not focus on student learning or on providing teachers time to monitor and assess children’s progress. In fact, it probably will add more work for already overwhelmed teachers. Most basically, the bill fails students.”
