Miami-Dade school district pushes state to soften high-stakes tests amid the pandemic
The Miami-Dade County School Board and Superintendent Alberto Carvalho are urging state leaders to remove accountability measures for this school year’s annual assessments, citing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the loss of instructional days.
Board members Wednesday agreed that the Florida Department of Education should “provide flexibility on assessment and accountability” for graduation requirements for the 2021-22 school year graduating class, third-grade retention requirements, school grades and improvement ratings and using test scores to determine teacher evaluations.
Though students still would be required to participate in their annual end-of-year exams, their scores would not be used against them.
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“We need to address the challenges and disruptions caused by COVID-19 on our students and teachers,” Carvalho said. “If we are to overcome the impact of this pandemic and accelerate our students to their full academic potential, we must seek all available resources.”
The superintendent on Friday sent a letter to Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran and U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona urging them to reconsider the implications of this year’s tests and encourage the state to amend its testing policy.
If requirements are relaxed for the 2021-22 year, it would be the second consecutive year where exam scores could be waived. Last year, about 8.5% of the state’s 2020-21 graduating class graduated with a test exemption, according to the Florida Education Department.
When schools closed because of COVID-19 in the 2019-20 year, no annual exams were administered.
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Annual tests would lead to unreliable data, officials say
The board’s effort comes as Miami-Dade schools continue to struggle with an ongoing teacher shortage, student absences and a high coronavirus positivity rate across the region, fueled by the omicron variant. The equivalent of 130,000 instructional days have been lost due to teacher and student absences during the pandemic, Carvalho told board members.
“This is a disruption that is not uniformly seen in every [area] in Florida,” and the impacts may result in varying outcomes from county to county, Carvalho told the board. In other words, some Florida districts may not be struggling with high student absentee rates, meaning fewer students in those districts could be experiencing the learning loss associated with missing class.
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Moreover, Carvalho said, the ongoing pandemic, coupled with a “high-stakes accountability agenda,” will lead to “highly invalid and unreliable data” that would then be applied to teacher evaluations and students’ ability to move past third grade or graduate high school. And that, he said, wouldn’t be fair.
United Teachers of Dade President Karla Hernandez-Mats echoed Carvalho. Providing flexibility to students and teachers is “in the best interest of this district,” Hernandez-Mats said.
For board member Lucia Baez-Geller, the board’s actions Wednesday should mark the first step toward reconsidering how assessments are utilized. Moving forward, she hopes the district continues to explore ways it can “assess that our students are actually grasping the curriculum, using it creatively and using it in a way that’s real to them and tangible,” she said.
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Legislative efforts underway
Gov. Ron DeSantis in September urged lawmakers to revamp the state’s annual accountability system, eliminate several of the annual exams students take at the end of the year and replace them with shorter “progress monitoring” reports administered throughout the year.
On Tuesday, the Senate Education Committee took steps toward that goal, advancing a bill that would put in place a computer-based “progress monitoring” tool and a new standardized test for English language arts and math, but fell short of achieving all of the governor’s goals.
The bill, sponsored by Sen. Manny Diaz, a Hialeah Republican, made no changes to end-of-year exams or the number of tests administered to students.
