Alice in Wonderland Validity Study: FSA is Valid Except When It Is Not

As expected and in typical bureaucratic doublespeak, the Florida Department of Education used the report by the sole bidders for the allegedly independent review of the 2015 FSA test to magically deem that Florida's test scores could be used in the aggregate for school grades and teacher evaluations. Commissioner Pam Stewart who has presided over much chaos and bears much responsibility for the many problems and lack of accuracy of her own statements in the Common Core standard and testing fiasco, called this statement by Alpine "welcome news." However, even the authors of the study, who have multiple incestuous relationships to the development of Common Core standards and the testing industry, admit numerous problems with their work blaming it all on a fast timeline or other factors beyond their control. Here are some of the most important issues: Admitted lack of rigor and adequate standardization The report's executive summary said, ""The evaluation team can reasonably state that the spring 2015 administration of the [Florida Standards Assessments] did not meet the normal rigor and standardization expected with a high-stakes assessment program like the FSA."

Basing the FSA on the Utah Test which has no Validity As FSCCC has previously reported, Florida is renting test questions from Utah for three years at a cost to the taxpayers of $16.2 million in addition to the reported $220 million cost of the 6 year testing contract. The Utah test still has no validity information, despite being used for the last two years. However, this should be no surprise as the Department has admitted doubts about the validity and usefulness of the FCAT 2.0 that had been in use since 2011 (see page 137).

The computer adaptive national SBAC test also developed by AIR also has zero validity and reliability data Here are the comments of testing specialist Dr. Doug McCrae presented to the California State Board of Education on 9/3/15:

"My name is Read more

Posted in Testing. Tagged as AIR, FSA, Validity Study.

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