By Drew Mortier
The Florida Legislature is making waves with its progressive dismissal of standardized, end-of-year testing in public schools. Traditionally, Florida has administered a state-wide assessment to public-school students as a way of monitoring educational progress. But as of earlier this year, at the urging of Governor DeSantis, this system is to be usurped by something called the Florida Assessment of Student Thinking (FAST) plan. FAST eschews the old model for a more student-centric approach, abandoning Common Core for a kind of individualized evaluation that examines the unique growth of a given student.
The end of Common Core in Florida
Common Core is the traditional public-school standard of the United States, emphasizing the instruction of specific concepts—what students are expected to learn per their grade level—with school success judged by end-of-year testing. These standards fall in two general realms of study, math and language arts in English.
Details about the new FAST method are still forthcoming, but already, school and district staff from Alachua County are, according to a recent press release, “reviewing the initial results for individual schools, grade levels and students.” Jennifer Wise, Chief of Teaching and Learning at Alachua County Public Schools, indicated that her team would be “digging deep into the data so that we can see where students improved and where they didn’t. That information will drive our instructional strategies for the upcoming school year.”
Florida is becoming the first state to undertake this kind of state-wide progress monitoring, and to completely eradicate common core from its standard practices. Thus far, partial state test results from Alachua County indicate improvements in local math scores with minor decreases in the language arts area. Data on student progress in science, civics and history remains to be seen.