Florida wants battle over school law sent to federal court

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Florida Education Commissioner Pam Stewart along with six school districts made a move late Wednesday to short-circuit a legal challenge to a state law that ties test scores to students’ academic promotion.

Attorneys representing Stewart and the districts asked a federal judge to take over the lawsuit filed by parents across the state.

The lawsuit challenges a state law that prevents children from rising to the fourth grade if they score poorly on a mandated reading test. The parents who sued are part of a growing movement to have children “opt out” of the standardized tests known as the Florida Standards Assessments.

The state’s request to move the lawsuit to federal court comes just days after Florida Circuit Judge Karen Gievers said she was troubled that children were held back because they refused to take the state’s high-stakes standardized test.

Gievers said she wanted to hear the case quickly because the school year is getting underway.

U.S. District Judge Mark Walker will hold an emergency hearing Friday on Stewart’s request.

Cheryl Etters, a spokeswoman for Stewart, refused to comment on the request, citing the pending legal case. But in filings lawyers argue the case belongs in federal court because the parents alleged that their equal protection rights were violated.

In response, an attorney for the parents dropped any claims that the state law violates any federally protected rights.

Andrea Mogensen, the attorney representing the parents, criticized the education commissioner’s legal maneuver.

“It would be in the children’s best interests that this issue be quickly resolved by the courts but, sadly, the department does not seem to want that result,” Mogensen said in a statement released by her law office.

Last week, Gievers held an emergency hearing to consider a request by the parents to block the testing law so that more than a dozen children from six counties — Broward, Orange, Osceola, Hernando, Pasco and Seminole — would not have to repeat the third grade.

The lawsuit states that the children should have been promoted because they got good grades and demonstrated they could read at grade level. School districts and state officials have defended the third-grade retentions and even disputed the academic performance of some of the children. The law was first put in place at the urging of then-Gov. Jeb Bush who said that too many schools were using social promotion and advancing children even though they lacked reading skills.