In 2022-23 School Year, Florida Students Will Take F.A.S.T. Three Times A Year

ST. PETERSBURG, FL — Students will no longer be required to take the Florida Standards Assessments testing after Gov. Ron DeSantis eliminated it by signing a bill into law Tuesday in St. Petersburg.

DeSantis said the FSA will be replaced with the Florida Assessment of Student Thinking (F.A.S.T.) The new state test will take place three times a year and will take an undetermined amount of hours to take instead of days. One of the purposes of the test is to monitor students' academic progress.

"So today we come not to praise the FSA but to bury it," DeSantis said to reporters during a press conference at St. Petersburg Collegiate High School. "We are here today with legislative leaders to officially eliminate FSA from the state of Florida."

Six months ago, DeSantis introduced the legislative proposal to replace the FSA with a new testing program that monitors progress.

"Instead of having one major test at the very end of the year that provided no feedback to the students before the summer came, we would do progress monitoring that would monitor progress throughout the school year, and be shorter and more individualized. And it would provide good feedback for students, for teachers, and for parents," DeSantis said.

Florida Education Association President Andrew Spar said the law fails to reduce testing, and does not eliminate the big end of year test.

His statement on the bill signing said: "When the governor said he was reducing testing, teachers and parents saw a real opportunity to fix what’s wrong with how Florida assesses students. We imagined better outcomes for kids. This bill does not reduce testing, but increases it. The bill does not focus on student learning or on providing teachers time to monitor and assess children’s progress. In fact, it probably will add more work for already overwhelmed teachers. Most basically, the bill fails students.”

The 2022-2023 school year will serve as a new baseline for school accountability. Florida will become the first state in the nation to do a full transition to progress monitoring to inform school accountability, according to the governor.

The new education law will require test results be given to teachers within a week and parents within two weeks, to allow “real time intervention before it’s too late,” DeSantis said, according to WFLA. Three check-ins during the school year are required to help students improve while closing achievement gaps.

The FSA measures a student's education assessments in English Language Arts, mathematics, algebra 1, algebra 2 and geometry, according to the Disability Rights Florida website. The ELA assessment is given to grades third-10th, and the mathematics assessment is given to students in grades third-eighth.

These have been the standards for determining what a child should know and be able to do at each grade level. Florida students will take the FSA one last time this spring.