In an email to school superintendents statewide Tuesday morning, Commissioner Pam Stewart of the Florida Department of Education says the computer issues that kept students fro taking the Florida Standards Assessment (FSA) test Monday and Tuesday have been identified and resolved, and that districts may begin or resume testing "as soon as they desire."
In the email, Stewart says that a software issue caused the log-in issues, including delays and error messages for a number of school districts, including several in south Florida.
According to Stewart, of the 69,177 tests that were started yesterday, 67,745 were completed.
The hosting provider for the test worked to restore service to the servers that support the FSA, and will continue to monitor server performance throughout the entire FSA testing window.
Monday and Tuesday, serious technological problems forced school districts to suspend the contentious new standardized test that middle- and high-school students are taking online.
As of Tuesday morning, school officials in South Florida say they're suspending those tests until the state fixes the computer glitches.
Multiple school districts from south Florida to the Panhandle halted the Florida Standards Assessment tests after the online portal that students must use for the test was slow or didn't let students log in at all. The tests are based on the controversial Common Core standards that have sparked opposition from some parents and teachers both in Florida and other states across the country.
School superintendents had already been bracing for potential problems, and had warned in recent weeks they weren't exactly sure how the roll out of the new test would go, especially in the middle-school and high-school grades.
Education Commissioner Pam Stewart had recently downplayed any potential problems, and said that districts had told the state they were prepared.
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The standardized tests are crucial because they are utilized by Florida to decide everything from who graduates to whether students are held back in the third grade.
Florida Department of Education spokeswoman Meghan Collins said many students were able to access the test, but that the commissioner was investigating and trying to resolve any issues that had arisen. Collins also noted that students have a two-week window in which to complete the 90-minute test.
But Miami-Dade Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said he had no plans to resume testing on Tuesday because he had "no confidence" that the problems would be fixed overnight. He said he made the decision because he not heard anything from state officials as to whether the problems had been resolved.
"Press the pause button significantly so to anticipate not just a fix for this issue but all the random glitches," Carvalho said.
Broward schools also announced they would suspend computer-based testing on Tuesday.
Critics of online testing said the problems just reinforced their position that the state was moving too quickly.
"Florida computerized tests are clearly not ready for prime time," said Bob Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing. "The reason is that they were rushed into place based on a Tallahassee-mandated schedule, not technical competence or educational readiness."
Florida first expanded the use of standardized testing under former Gov. Jeb Bush. But last year was the final one where students took what was known as the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test or FCAT.
Field testing on the test was done in Utah, but not in Florida. Carvalho had testified last month before legislators that the state should test its platform to make sure it could deal with hundreds of thousands of students trying to log on.
