Advertisement

Pinellas schools eliminate many year-end exams

 
Ninth-graders at Land O’Lakes High School wait in March to get started on the writing part of the Florida Standards Assessments. Pinellas students also will still have to take required state exams, including Florida Standards Assessments and some other year-end tests. 
Ninth-graders at Land O’Lakes High School wait in March to get started on the writing part of the Florida Standards Assessments. Pinellas students also will still have to take required state exams, including Florida Standards Assessments and some other year-end tests. 
Published April 28, 2015

The testing load became much lighter for Pinellas County students on Monday.

Superintendent Mike Grego announced the elimination of all end-of-course exams not required by the state. That amounts to about 450 local tests that children in first through 12th grades would have taken this spring to help evaluate their teachers' performance.

The move does not end local final exams, but it gets rid of a second "final" that students would have taken in the same course. It also gives teachers greater control of their classrooms, assistant superintendent Pam Moore said in a memo to staff, and allows schools to "rightfully determine the best methods for assessing student learning."

Pinellas becomes the latest in a growing number of Florida school districts to eliminate tests that had been required until lawmakers rewrote the rules this spring. Miami-Dade and Broward counties gained national attention last week by taking the same step, their superintendents saying the time had come to restore teaching and learning time to schools.

Leon County schools also announced Monday they would cut their local exams. Hillsborough County has yet to make an announcement on whether it will continue to require some or all of its local exams.

Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association president Mike Gandolfo praised lawmakers for paving the way to reduce testing, and Pinellas district leaders for walking down the path.

"With House Bill 7069, we were grateful for it, but we knew it doesn't go nearly far enough," Gandolfo said. "We were hoping our district would take matters into its own hands. This is really good news."

HB 7069 removed the requirement in law that schools "administer for each course offered in the district a local assessment that measures student mastery of course content at the necessary level of rigor for the course."

A handful of districts, such as Pasco, had trimmed some local exams before this change, saying they would assess children without written tests. But the revision to law freed superintendents to make wholesale reductions to the system they had criticized as overburdened with tests that served no educational purpose.

Pinellas students will still have to take required state exams, including the Florida Standards Assessments and some other year-end tests. The district will continue to require final exams in some middle school and high school classes, but teachers will have the discretion whether to use their own tests or ones provided by the district, depending on what works best for their courses, Moore said.

"We want to get back to . . . the proper use of assessments," she said.

Earlier this year, Pinellas eliminated its elementary social studies and health. The tests eliminated on Monday include:

• Grades 1-4 science.

• Elementary art, music, physical education and world languages.

• Middle school and high school courses such as world languages that don't require state assessment.

The elementary-level tests will become optional.

"Elementary art, music, P.E. and world languages teachers have the option to utilize district exams if they would like, but there is no requirement to give them," Moore wrote.

This decision tracks with Grego's view that the state had become too intimately involved in the education of children. A former state chancellor of K-12 schools, Grego suggested lawmakers should create a "robust accountability system," but then "let the local education system work to improve the district."

The district had not planned to count these exam results toward teacher evaluations this year, Moore said.

Florida has been at the forefront of the national testing movement for more than a decade, with former Gov. Jeb Bush promoting the model across the country. Lately, the system has come under fire from parents and educators, with even Bush and his supporters calling for "fewer, better tests."

The state eliminated the 11th grade language arts test it was to debut this year, before it ever was offered. But most of the cuts have come at the local level.

Pinellas School Board member Carol Cook said that's the way it should be.

"We have for years been talking about the authority the (Florida) Constitution gives us and wanting that local authority given back to us," said Cook, who also chairs the legislative committee of the state school boards association. "Now that they're giving it to us, we certainly can't complain."

She said Pinellas went about the changes the right way, evaluating its tests with teachers and other interested parties, and not making a knee-jerk reaction. Accountability still exists, she said, but it's closer to the local level.

"This is a good way to do it, that the teachers themselves can decide," board chairwoman Linda Lerner added. "This is a step in the right direction."

Contact Jeffrey S. Solochek at jsolochek@tampabay.com or (813) 909-4614. Follow @jeffsolochek.