Make the big new DeSanTest optional -- if you trust parents

Meet the new test. Same as the old test (or worse). We all knew the governor was lying about doing away with Florida's Big Standardized Test. Now how do we leverage the lie?

This is the state test calendar for next year’s useless massive spring standardized test season in Florida. Note the weeks and weeks of waste scheduled. This doesn’t even count the new “mini” tests coming in the fall and winter.

[I particularly like the “FSA retakes” scheduled for September. That’s three weeks of retakes of a test that will no longer exist for a purpose no one can fathom. There is no purpose for taking the FSA now. Retaking it next year is absurdity that breaks your brain if you try to think about it.]

Wait, what’s that you say? This all can’t be true.

Ron DeSantis promised an end to the useless Big Standardized Test era in Florida. You wrote a whole thing about it, Billy.

I’m sorry to break this to you, folks, but Ron DeSantis lies. Regularly.

Many of us predicted the lie, while noting how helpful it was for DeSantis and Corcoran to trash Big Test while plotting to make it bigger with state “progress monitoring.” I very much expected this moment to come — and looked forward to it.

As the friend who sent me that schedule noted:

People still think testing is going away ... And I don't see any media coverage about it.

Let’s see if we can change that.

Make the archaic (and non-existent) DeSanTest optional

Mind you, the state computer test platform itself does not yet exist. It will be an untested mashup of a couple of existing on-line assessment company products as I understand it.

It’s going to be a shit show of implementation and bandwidth overseen by the same corrupt and incompetent state DoE that quite recently spawned two distinct bid-rigging scandals in one tiny county at the same time a DoE “innovation” team was running an active theft ring.

Florida’s DoE today can’t function as anything but a crime syndicate and right-wing meme-creator.

Manny Diaz fully owns this trainwreck in waiting, assuming he gets confirmed today as Education Commissioner. Perhaps that explains the huge open windows of time allotted for new Big Test in the spring.

By the way, I happen to have Board of Education Member Ryan Petty’s cell phone number; and I texted him this morning:

Dude you gonna ask Manny about him taking a shot at DeSantis and all of you about your “tone”. Or are you just gonna take it. LOL

Also make the big new DeSanTest optional if you believe in parental choice.

I’ll let you know if I get an answer.

Save our children from data grifters and groomers

Anyway, no child should be forced to sit for this anti-human, useless grift.

Make the DeSanTest optional.

That’s the spirit of “choice” right?

Big Test and Big Data grift is much scarier for your child than any book you people want to burn. It “grooms” flesh and blood children almost from the moment of self-awareness to define themselves as a sortable number.

Ending that grooming is not a grift.

And if we had a functioning opposition party in this state, with sharp candidates for governor, it would be running on:

The governor lied; so we will make the DeSanTest optional. Because we actually trust parents, not think tanks and book banners and groomer grifters.