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Politics

Pam Stewart: FDOE Will Seek Monetary Damages Against AIR for FSA Glitches

September 18, 2015 - 6:45pm

Commissioner of Education Pam Stewart said Friday the Florida Department of Education will be seeking monetary damages from American Institutes for Research over this year’s technical difficulties with the Florida Standards Assessment.

“We’ll be seeking monetary damages from the vendor,” she said, but would not comment more about the timeline of the legal process. She also did not say how much money the department would be seeking in retribution.

Stewart’s comments come after recent days of harsh criticisms of the department and the FSA, which has been mired in controversy since its debut earlier this year.

From the get-go, the FSA test was riddled with technical problems, including a cyber attack from an unknown source and a slow-moving AIR server which left thousands of students with error messages in their language arts and mathematics tests.

State lawmakers responded swiftly to the testing issues. Most were highly critical of the test’s rocky roll-out, with some calling for a mandatory paper and pen option until the technical glitches were smoothed out.

Ultimately, legislators passed a bill which required the department to hire an independent company to verify whether the FSA was a valid tool to assess the academic achievement of Florida’s students.

Earlier this month, the department unveiled results of the summer-long validity study, which said the FSA fit the mold for general best test practices and thus was a valid test.

Yet despite the overall passing score for the FSA, some of the study’s conclusions and recommendations came under fire from lawmakers and public education officials statewide who expressed concerns over some of the test’s items not being reviewed fully for their applicability to Florida education standards.

The department has since attempted to fight back against “misconceptions” about the study’s results. On Thursday, it sent out a press release with five claims about the FSA, which was not received warmly by some state lawmakers.

Sen. Bill Montford, D-Tallahassee, said the department’s news blast trying to dispel “myths” was “offensive” during Thursday’s Senate Pre-K-12 Education Committee meeting.

Senators also fielded questions to representatives from Alpine Testing Solutions and edCount on the specifics of the validity study.

Andrew Wylie of Alpine Testing said the Utah-based company was put on a pressuring timeline to complete the study.

“There was a very aggressive timeline set at the beginning of the process,” Wylie said.

Wylie admitted that although Alpine had done validity testing before with different types of test, the testing company had never reviewed a statewide assessment like the FSA.

Ultimately, Wylie said the results seemed to indicate the test was still on par with Florida standards.

“While the review process was not ideal ... it still was consistent with the test standards,” he said. “Content-wise, I think the content matches the standards at an appropriate level.”

Commissioner Pam Stewart said the department looked over two drafts of Alpine's study and briefly reviewed the final results around 5 p.m. Aug. 31, the day before the study results were released. While department officials didn't have any specific influence over the study's conclusions, the department did request to improve some aspects of the document, which was done via telephone.

 

Wylie admitted there was “rigorous debate” on the study’s results.

 

“This was not an easy decision,” he said.

 

Reach Allison Nielsen by email at allison@sunshinestatenews.com



 

Comments

If anyone doubts the claim the Jeb bush's phony Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE) is running the Florida Department of Education, go to the FOIA emails on the site below that proves it!. We probably need to get more recent emails with another FOIA request. Pam Stewart appears to be willing to say anything to keep the common core infrastructure in place even as it implodes of its own ineptitude. http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/florida/

She is an employee of the Jeb Busch Educational Foundation. She could care less what you have to say. She gets her marching orders from Patricia Leviseque.

I'd like to see her get marching orders from Trey Gowdy to testify in front of a congressional hearing on the Federal DOE takeover of education.

That would be precious! By the way. Is a constitutional officer, like Pam Stewart, lying to a State Senate Committee against the law? I guess not because she does it and nothing happens. However if she serves at the pleasure of Governor Scott, it would be his responsibility.

If the test scores are valid and you can use them to sanction schools, teachers, and students, you got what you paid for. Why sue?

LOL! AIR is not afraid of your lawsuit Pam Stewart. But you should be very afraid of the class action lawsuit that will surely land on your desk if you impose high stakes consequences on students and teachers from a test that is NOT valid. You and the FL legislature own this. You stripped decision making from local school boards and teachers closest to our children. It doesn't take a genius to see the flaws in your interpretation of the test validity. So go ahead, file your lawsuit. Then maybe all the lies, malfeasance , and blatant disregard for the rule of law will finally be exposed.

#IndependentNOTindependent

#IndependentNOTindependent

Wait! What? Weren't we told this week that any problems with the #FSAFiasco were from misunderstandings? The test is #ValidNotValid to be used to evaluate teachers and rank schools...why the need to seek monetary damages from AIR?

Remember that Commissioner Stewart testified in front of the March 3rd Florida Senate Appropriations Committee on Education that AIR had done a validity study and that “our own team that is the test development team that has reviewed that and we are certain that the content of the test is absolutely psychometrically valid and reliable.” Commissioner Stewart also commented that the study said i “Prior to the use of the FSA, all items were reviewed by educators knowledgeable of Florida students and the Florida Standards to evaluate whether the items were appropriate for use within the FSA program”. Do we even know how many test items AIR has for each assessment? The report relied totally on the assurance that the Florida test development group had validated every FSA test item. It looks like someone needs to show evidence that someone looked at all the FSA test items. If no one did look at all the test items, why are we hearing that they were all valid and aligned from Pam Stewart. If they were all examined then someone needs to ask why invalid and non aligned items were left in the FSA assessment given to our children.

Why Pam, didn't you tell everybody that AIR was hacked by mysterious anti-common core miscreants? Weren’t you just telling us all that the assessments were valid? You still want to use the assessment results. So where are the damages? Other than to students and teachers, that is.

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