Flawed FSA shouldn’t be used for grading anyone
Illustration: Robert Rendo
No one is surprised that the Florida Standards Assessment (FSA) was deemedvalid by the EdCount/Alpine study. What’s odd is that the equally important factor of reliability was not considered. Finding the FSA psychometrically valid does not address the terrible conditions under which the test was administered, nor does it resolve significant concerns about psychometric reliability. Ignoring this, Education Commissioner Pam Stewart assumed that “all Floridians will share my confidence in the assessment.”
There isn’t a Florida student, parent, teacher, superintendent, board member or administrator who doesn’t see through this charade. Superintendents fromLeon to Miami-Dade have expressed their deep concerns. The study’s own numbers point out that just 65 percent of the test items match the Florida Standards. It concludes that it would be wrong to retain students or deny diplomas based on the 2015 FSA, yet Commissioner Stewart plans to use these same flawed test results to set pass/fail cut scores, grade schools and evaluate teachers. It’s fundamentally unfair to punish teachers and grade schools based on scores where 35 percent of the test items were never taught to Florida students.
Put another way, if a student answered every question based on the Florida Flawed FSA shouldn’t be used for grading anyone | The Edvocate Blog:
