Summer Institute countdown: 13 weeks.
Spring Break–the calm before the standardized-testing storm.
It’s Spring Break for many South Florida schools, and teachers like me are catching up on sleep, Netflix, and counting down until summer. Nine weeks, by the way. But between this week-long idyll and the blue-sky expanse of June through August, we have testing season. As a teacher who moved to the US as an adult, the idea of teaching for three quarters and testing for one was my first shock, eight years ago.
The next was that standardized testing was exactly that–it rewards standard thinking and standard patchwriting. You can count on the SoFlo Writing Project to challenge these kinds of long-standing traditions by bringing about person-centered, justice-oriented writing to support the development of students and teachers as expert writers.
In early 2022, Governor DeSantis announced that the Florida Standards Assessments (F.S.A) would be canceled, that he would “bury it” with bill SB 1048 (WLRN, 2022). I remember announcing this to my tenth-graders, receiving phone calls from delighted parents, and being hopeful that I could devote more classroom time to learning, instead of test-prep.
However, like in any good Zombie movie, the baddie didn’t stay dead and buried for long. In the next breath, and in the same press conference, DeSantis declared the F.S.A. not only resurrected but multiplied, transforming it into the carefully acronymed B.E.S.T. (Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking) aligned F.A.S.T. (Florida Assessment of Student Thinking) progress monitoring. I’ll translate: The F.S.A. tested reading and writing annually for grades 3-10, with the 10th grade tests meeting the Reading graduation requirement for high schoolers. The F.A.S.T. now tests students THREE times annually, for grades 3-10 with the tenth grade tests, again, qualifying high school seniors as meeting the State-mandated reading graduation requirement.
What does this mean in practical terms? It means that teachers must now spend three times as long, per year, teaching to the test. A lay reader might ask, but aren’t you meant to be teaching reading and writing? And aren’t these exactly what the tests, well, test?
Good question. Yes, and no.
I have a BA in journalism from one of the UK’s top ten universities. As a graduate, I went into law, reading, synthesizing, and writing complex documents. I am a current graduate student in the Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program at NSU. I do not grade F.A.S.T. reading multiple choice practice tests without the answer key because I often get the answers wrong. Students are not encouraged to think critically, but to find the answer that the examiners have predetermined as most correct. Not just correct.
But isn’t it a good thing that students will be writing more? Another excellent question; yes, writing is good, for students, for all of us. But a wide range of writing types is better. With every grade level reached in Florida, the types of writing that students are expected to practice narrows. And standardized testing focuses only on two genres of writing: informative and discursive. Students receive three sources, and are expected to use at least two to either regurgitate an expository essay from, or form an argument with a counterclaim. In short, students now receive a more limited teaching time, with a narrower range of texts, and a shallower set of writing skills that focuses mainly on patchwriting. Patchwriting, using formulaic templates and sources to create a new text, isn’t wrong–it can be a great starting point for students to practice and follow new ways of writing–but it shouldn’t be the end goal. Through the SFWP’s focus on research-based teaching practices, educators will learn how to harness and incorporate a wider range of writing genres for students to support not only their learning and engagement, but also their sense of identity and agency as writers.