Editor’s note: This post was written by WLRN reporter Anthony Cave. The FCAT testing season is over. And students say schools are rounding out the school year with a little fun. Spencer Semon, an eighth-grader at North Miami Middle school says, “all we have is field trips left and that’s about it.” Semon and almost […]
Monday’s post about New York’s education department officials throwing out the now-infamous “The Hare and the Pineapple” section of its statewide reading was a lesson in reading comprehension itself. Readers disagreed on whether the section of the test was fair or not. Alejandro Roggio thought the passage and questions were fine:
The New York education department took the unusual step of releasing a state reading test section last week after Internet buzz about the confusing passage and questions built to a roar. The passage was called the “Hare and the Pineapple,” and was authored by children’s author Daniel Pinkwater. Typically test questions are not released to […]
Danna Contreras doesn’t like the new FCAT. The sophomore at Booker T. Washington High School in Miami emigrated from Colombia three years ago. She wears thick, pink-rimmed glasses and she squints a lot. She says the new computerized version is harder to take. “I think I am better with paper, not on the computer because […]
Our friends at StateImpact Ohio have an interesting look at how Ohio comes up with the wording on its standardized tests. By committee, of course. A controversy over a question about the Arab perception of the creation of Israel prompted concerns that the questions might not be without bias. In Florida, though, the test contractor […]
Florida schools do not have patterns of suspicious test results that have plagued schools in Atlanta, Baltimore, St. Louis and elsewhere, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of testing data from 69,000 schools in 49 states. Only one county, Gadsden in the Panhandle, had more than 10 percent of schools show unusual gains or losses […]
Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson says the state may not include schools that specialize in students with disabilities in the new school grading formula now under discussion. “One simulation, for example,” Robinson said in a statement released Thursday afternoon, “includes grading all schools that serve students with disabilities; however, we are reviewing alternative options for schools […]
Florida has been holding back third graders who fail the state reading exam since 2003. Now Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico and Tennessee are trying to mirror Florida’s policy, according to The Wall Street Journal. But is Florida’s policy a good one? Jaryn Emhof, with the Foundation for Florida’s Future said third grade is the most important […]
A legal challenge is being waged over a contract with the Florida Department of Education. A rejected vendor is protesting DOE’s selection of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) to develop test items and more under the “Florida Interim Assessment Item Bank and Test Platform.” The funding is provided by a Race to the Top grant from […]
A new book is making a claim against a college admissions staple: the SATs. “SAT Wars” author Joseph Soares says SAT scores are weak predictors of college performance. And he argues the high stakes test tends to cater to white, male students with upper income backgrounds, according to the New York Times. His book points to […]
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