PANAMA CITY — Serious technological problems on Monday forced many schools — including most Bay County schools — to suspend a contentious new standardized test that middle- and high-school students are taking online.
Multiple school districts from south Florida to the Panhandle halted the Florida Standards Assessment (FSA) tests after the online portal that students must use for the test was slow or didn’t let students log in at all.
School superintendents had already been bracing for potential problems, and had warned in recent weeks they weren’t exactly sure how the rollout of the new test would go, especially in the middle-school and high-school grades.
Officials at Bay District Schools said Friday the ability of the computers to handle the traffic was among their worries about the test.
Monday, those worries came true. All Bay District Schools experienced some issues with the FSA’s American Institutes for Research (AIR) test platform, according to Camilla Hudson, Bay District Schools coordinator of assessment and accountability.
Hudson said she knew Arnold, Bay and Rutherford high schools and Jinks Middle School had successful testing. Other schools simply opted out of testing Monday.
“The schools that did test had some success and some issues,” she said.
Florida Commissioner of Education Pam Stewart held a conference call Monday afternoon, addressing the issue.
Hudson said superintendents will be notified by 7 a.m. today about whether testing will proceed and what the problems were.
“I am assuming that the folks at the Department of Education, along with the folks at AIR, will work throughout the evening together to try to find out what the exact problems were and remedy those, get those fixed and let us know how we are to proceed,” Hudson said Monday afternoon.
Education Commissioner Pam Stewart had recently downplayed any potential problems, and said that districts had told the state they were prepared.
The standardized tests are crucial because they are utilized by Florida to decide everything from who graduates to whether students are held back in the third grade.
Florida Department of Education spokeswoman Meghan Collins said many students were able to access the test, but that the commissioner was investigating and trying to resolve any issues that had arisen. Collins also noted that students have a two-week window in which to complete the 90-minute test.
But Miami-Dade Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said he had no plans to resume testing on Tuesday because he had “no confidence” that the problems would be fixed overnight. He said he made the decision because he not heard anything from state officials as to whether the problems had been resolved.
“Press the pause button significantly so to anticipate not just a fix for this issue but all the random glitches,” Carvalho said.
Critics of online testing said the problems just reinforced their position that the state was moving too quickly.
“Florida computerized tests are clearly not ready for prime time,” said Bob Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing. “The reason is that they were rushed into place based on a Tallahassee-mandated schedule, not technical competence or educational readiness.”
Florida first expanded the use of standardized testing under former Gov. Jeb Bush. But last year was the final one where students took what was known as the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test or FCAT.
Field testing on the test was done in Utah, but not in Florida. Carvalho had testified last month before legislators that the state should test its platform to make sure it could deal with hundreds of thousands of students trying to log on.
News Herald Writer Amanda Banks and The Associated Press contributed to this report.