9-year-old Sydney Smoot had a bone to pick with the Hernando County School Board. The issue? The Florida Standards Assessment Test, or FSA for short. On March 17, 2015, Sydney bravely stood up at her local school board meeting to share how she felt about the test and why she believes it's failing students and teachers.
The video struck a nerve, racking up over 2 million views on YouTube. Though not an official record, we're betting Sydney's speech made this one of the most watched local school board meetings of all time.
"This testing looks at me as a number," she said, craning her neck to speak into the mic, but speaking with no shortage of ferocity. "One test defines me as either a failure or a success through a numbered rubric. One test at the end of the year that the teacher or myself will not even see the grade until after the school year is already over. I do not feel that all this FSA testing is accurate to tell how successful I am. It doesn't take in account all of my knowledge and abilities, just a small percentage."
Can we give this little girl a medal? She was speaking right to our souls with that speech!
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Here's the full transcript of her remarks:
“Fellow members of the school board, today I will express my concerns about the FSA testing. I consider myself a well-educated young lady. However, with FSA tests my five years of school… do not matter. This testing looks at me as a number. One test defines me as either a failure or a success through a numbered rubric. One test at the end of the year that the teacher or myself will not see the grade [for] until after the school year is already over.
I do not feel that all of this FSA testing is accurate to tell how successful I am. It doesn’t take into account all of my knowledge and abilities, just a small percentage. Here are my concerns. First of all, I do not feel good signing a form in the FSA ensuring that you can’t even discuss the test with your parents. I am not comfortable signing something like this I have the right to talk to my parents about any and everything related to school and my education. Second, why am I being forced to take a test that hasn’t even been testing on students here in Florida, so how can it be accurate and valid on what I know? Why are we taking most of the year stressing and prepping for one test at the end of the year when we should be taking tests throughout the year that really measure our abilities?
My opinion is that we should take a test at the beginning of the year, middle, and end of the school year to accurately measure what we know. The pressure this puts on me and I’m sure most students is not healthy. Why should we have so much stress about one test when we should be learning and having fun in school? With all of this testing in school, more fun things such as recess are being eliminated because of training for the test! So, ladies and gentlemen of the school board, I urge you to put a stop to high-stakes testing today. It’s not fair to the schools, teachers, and students. Parents and students, contact your governor to put a stop to all the standardized testing. Thank you so much for your time.”
High-stakes testing takes a real toll on students. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Since the FSA was first implemented, it came under intense criticism.
Critics said it takes critical funds away from students and does not do as good of a job as national testing standards in helping to prepare young students for higher education or careers after their K-12 school is complete. In fact, more recent research shows that class grades are a far better predictor of success than the SAT, ACT, or any standardized testing results:
"That’s because standardized tests have a major blind spot," writes Edutopia. "The exams fail to capture the 'soft skills' that reflect a student’s ability to develop good study habits, take academic risks, and persist through challenges, for example. High school grades, on the other hand, appear to do a better job mapping the area where resilience and knowledge meet. Arguably, that’s the place where potential is translated into real achievement."
The stress of these tests also takes a very real toll on students, especially ones who may be experiencing hardship outside of school.
In 2022, about seven years after Sydney spoke in front of the board, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis officially did away with the FSA program. "Today we come, not to praise the FSA, but to bury it," DeSantis said at the time.
The FSA was replaced with a progress monitoring system that was meant to reduce testing times and give students more updated progress goals as their education continues throughout the academic year.
"Instead of having one major test at the end of the year which provided no feedback to students before the summer came, we would do progress monitoring that would monitor progress throughout the school year," DeSantis added. "It would be shorter, it would be more individualized, and it would provide good feedback for students, for teachers, and for parents."
The new system is called FAST assessments — Florida Assessment of Student Thinking — and is still rolling out across the state.
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That's the kind of statement a young Sydney Smoot could get behind. In fact, the new system isn't all that different from what Sydney herself proposed in her address to the board. But many other states still follow antiquated standardized testing practices — often remnants of the No Child Left Behind era — and that's why Sydney's words still resonate so powerfully nearly a decade later.
Today, Smoot is a Marine Sciences student at Oregon State University. Indeed, a simple one-size-fits-all rubric would have never been able to measure her aptitude and likelihood for success. She was right about that all along.
This article originally appeared 10 years ago. It has been updated.