Scott’s opt-out fever spreads to student testing The quest to portray the federal government as an evil interloper also has spread to education. Frank Cerabino Palm Beach Post, August 29, 2014 Opt-out fever is raging in Florida. The latest opt-out calamity flared up this week at the Lee County School Board meeting, which ended in a remarkable decision by its board members to opt out of the state-mandated standardized testing of students. Like so much other manufactured hysteria, the roots of this defection can be traced to the Obama-as-bogeyman imperative that has been metastasizing in Florida in ways that now threaten its biggest practitioner, Gov. Rick Scott. When Lee County became the first county in the state to say it won’t allow its students to submit to the Florida Common Core standardized test, it initiated an act of defiance that leads right to Scott’s door. Scott could exercise his authority to remove those Lee County School Board members from office for refusing to follow the law, the school board attorney advised them. But that would be a dramatic role change. Because opting out is Scott’s main move. Under his leadership, Florida has opted out of a federally financed high-speed rail project, sections of the Obamacare health care law, and even a federal program that would have paid for biking and walking trails in the state. The quest to portray the federal government as an evil interloper also has spread to education. Despite Florida’s leading role in a consortium of states devising a national testing standard — a movement led primarily by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — Scott decided that Florida would opt out of that too. The reason was because the Obama administration had embraced the national testing effort and put stimulus money behind it. And suddenly, Bush’s national testing plan became known as ObamaCore to its detractors, and Scott showed once again that he was eager to flex his opt-out muscle. “Floridians have raised concerns about the federal government’s interest in using educational standards and assessments to collect data on psychological attitudes, values and beliefs,” Scott wrote in explaining why Florida would no longer participate in the national testing plan. By doing so, Scott was aligning himself with the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition, a grab bag of politically conservative interests which imagine that the purpose of national educational standards is for the federal government to collect data on children. “Instead of knowledge-based academic and cognitive concepts, our children will be taught and assessed on controversial psychosocial attitudes and beliefs and have that data become part of their records — all without parental knowledge or consent,” that group contends. “This data can and will likely be used to psychologically profile children for everything from ‘kindergarten readiness’ to the type of job for which government or corporate authorities determine they are most suited.” After rejecting the national test, Florida had to create one of its own, and without enough time to do that, the state has resorted to spending $5.4 million to buy test questions from Utah’s standardized test. But this expensive and symbolic show of defiance to the federal government hasn’t been enough to satisfy the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition, which sees Scott’s efforts at breaking away from the federal effort as not going far enough. They now want to opt out of the opt-out. This has put Scott in the potentially unfamiliar role of being the person to talk reason to the unreasonable people he has encouraged. That’s not going to happen any time soon. Instead, Scott announced plans to form a committee to conduct a “thorough and comprehensive investigation of every standardized test” students in Florida must take. That’s quite a tightrope trick: Supporting the Florida Standards Assessments he made possible while also sounding like he’s against standardized testing. But at least it spares him the ironic task of explaining to his supporters in Lee County why it’s not a good idea to opt out of a government program. fcerabino@pbpost
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 16:25:42 +0000
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