Florida sets ‘more rigorous bar’ for state tests in public schools

Florida’s public school students likely will find it harder to pass required state tests, including key ones needed for high school graduation, under a new scoring system approved Wednesday.

The State Board of Education voted unanimously to adopt the scoring plan for FAST, Florida’s newest series of standardized language arts and math tests. Students took FAST last school year, but it was scored on a system devised for the FSA, the test retired in 2022.

FAST, unlike its predecessors, is a progress-monitoring exam that includes shorter tests at the beginning and middle of the school year to show how students are progressing. The third test, given in the spring, is a high-stakes one, with third-grade language arts scores used to make fourth-grade promotion decisions and the algebra 1 and 10th-grade language arts exams required for a diploma.

If the new scoring system had been in place when students took FAST last spring, fewer students in grades 3 to 10 would have passed compared with a year earlier, state data shows.

On the third-grade language arts exam, for example, 51% would have scored on grade level on the language arts exam compared to 53% last year.

On the 10th-grade language arts exam, 47% of sophomores would have passed compared to 49% in 2022. On the Algebra 1 exam, 51% of students would have passed compared to 54% in 2022.

“The idea is to raise the bar and continue to move our students forward,” said Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, just before the board’s vote at its meeting in Orlando.

“Students are resilient and traditionally have risen to the occasion,” Diaz said, calling the state’s plan a “reasonable and measured approach to raise the bar.”

The new scoring plan kicks in this school year, so it affects current 10th graders set to graduate from high school in 2026. As in the past, students can retake the high school exams if they do not pass the first time. Students who have already passed the FSA version of 10th-grade language arts and algebra 1 are not affected by the changes adopted Wednesday.

The FAST, like the FSA and the FCAT before that, is scored on a five-level system, with a 3 considered “on grade level” or passing. The board’s vote set the “cut scores” for each test, or what score separates a 2 from a 3, for example.

Though students who took FAST earlier this year would have passed in lower percentages than they passed the FSA in 2022, that data is not a prediction for how students who take FAST exams this coming spring will do, said Juan Copa, the deputy commissioner at the Florida Department of Education who oversees testing.

But Florida is “setting a more rigorous bar” on the new test, and that is what it has done for the past two decades, Copa said. When the state moved from giving students the FCAT to administering FCAT 2.0 in 2011 and then decided to switch to the FSA in 2015 it also made passing the new exam somewhat harder for students, he noted.

“Is it a more rigorous bar? Yes,” Copa said when he explained the changes to a Florida Senate committee last week. “But is it a more rigorous bar that’s outside the norm in terms of what is achievable? No.”

The process of setting passing scores for state exams has been contentious in the past, as the state weighs making them harder against the possible public outcry about high failure rates.

In 2011, Orange County’s then-superintendent warned that the proposed scoring changes would mean “blood on the table,” and in 2015 one member of the state board unsuccessfully urged the board to adopt even higher passing scores than the commissioner recommended, saying without them Florida students will “not be ready to meet the global competition.”

Nancy Lawther of the Florida PTA was the only person who spoke about the passing scores at Wednesday’s meeting. The PTA, she said, urged the state board to phase in the 10th-grade requirements, noting the passing score on that language arts exam proposed by Diaz was higher than that recommended by the two panels the education department tapped to consider a scoring plan for the new test.

“We recommend that you raise this particular bar incrementally,” Lawther said.

The board adopted Diaz’s recommendation, however.

Diaz, a former state senator, sponsored the legislation to switch to a progress-monitoring system, which on Wednesday he called a “game changer” that allows teachers to “where students are and really be able to attack the deficiencies as the school year is going.”

Scores for FCAT and FSA typically came back at the end of the school year or during the summer.

“The moment had passed,” Copa said. “Now parents, teachers and students have that information during the school year to course correct.”

The new scoring system will play into Florida’s annual A-to-F school report card. With the scoring system set, the state will now calculate schools’ 2023 grades, though they will be “informational baseline” grades that will carry no consequences for schools.

The 2024 grades will be used for accountability purposes, meaning schools with low grades, as in the past, could face state-mandated improvement plans and, if they do not make gains in the following years, even a state takeover.