The results are in from last year's Florida Standards Assessments, and in an ironic twist, the school district which has been fighting against the test all summer long performed the best in Central Florida.
Seminole County school officials said while they are happy with their students' performance on the tests, they are still no fans of the FSA.
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It took six long months to find out how students did on Florida's first FSA tests, though those students were promoted to the next grade as usual, without knowing if they passed the assessments.
It's still unknown how many students passed, since the state has not determined a passing score. So, from the preliminary results released Wednesday, all we know is about half of students in Central Florida scored in the top 50th percentile.
Seminole County Superintendent Walt Griffin said while he is proud of his district's performance, he is concerned with how the scores will ultimately be used when calculating school grades.
"I have concerns about the scores overall," Griffin said. "Still a lot of unknowns."
Griffin and other districts have been supporting a push first dubbed the "Sunshine Solution" to get rid of the FSA and adopt another test, like the SAT and the Iowa Assessment. The push was originally known as the "Seminole Solution," as it first gained popularity in Seminole County.
"We would prefer a test that could be given in a very short amount of time," Griffin said. "We tied up a lot of instructional days to administer the FSA. We need something that we can give in about four hours, and more important, something where we could get results back in a timely manner, so that before students leave for summer, parents would have the results in their hands."
"These scores provide information of little value about the performance of our district, schools and students due to initial implementation problems and validity concerns," Orange County Public Schools said in a statement Wednesday. "Parents should receive limited information from FLDOE on their student’s performance by end of October."
While these numbers give districts an idea of how their students performed comparatively, schools are still waiting to get individual results for these tests.