Florida will stop using “outdated” end-of-year exams in favor of Progress tests three times a year, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced last week.

He didn’t provide details, but promised progress monitoring, dubbed the Florida Assessments of Student Thinking (FAST), would require less testing time, reports Andrew Ujifusa on Education Week.

Florida’s accountability system for schools relies on the end-of-year exams. It’s not clear how the state will assess schools’ effectiveness.

DeSantis said the new “progress monitoring” system will create opportunities to check in on student progress in the fall, winter, and spring, writes Ujifusa. It will be “customizable” to each student’s performance level and provide results immediately.

The Florida Education Association expressed support for the idea pitched by DeSantis. Alberto Carvalho, the superintendent of Miami-Dade County schools in Florida, one of the largest districts in the country, praised DeSantis, saying the change would enable “real-time progress monitoring data enable timely academic recalibration opportunities that are right for Florida’s kids.”

Federal law requires states to use an assessment system, they have considerable flexibility in how to do that.

Educators complain that testing takes too much time and doesn’t provide results until students have moved on to the next grade, writes Linda Jacobson on The 74. But education experts want to know the details of DeSantis’ plan.

“If they take the current test and cut it into three pieces, spreading it out over the year, it’s perhaps not that big a deal,” said Dale Chu, a senior visiting fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank. “But if schools didn’t like the ‘high-stakes’ nature of annual testing, they’ll be in for a rude awakening when the pressure’s on three times a year.”

. . . Patricia Levesque, executive director of Foundation for Florida’s Future — part of the Foundation for Excellence in Education launched by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — raised additional questions about the plan. One is whether teachers would be required to teach on Tallahassee’s timetable in order to be prepared for the three statewide tests and another is whether the spring test would simply replace the end-of-year test, giving teachers “less time to cover the full year of content.”

“DeSantis’s proposal applies to standardized tests for English language arts and math,” writes Jacobson, “but doesn’t eliminate high school end-of-course tests in algebra, U.S. history and biology.”