Was proctoring the FCAT worth 50+ million of your tax dollars every year?

It currently costs $12,700 dollars a year to educate a student in the US public schools.  That works out to about $70/day.  Here in Florida, that number shrinks to $8,887/student, or about $49.40/day (let's just call it $50/day).  Today's FCAT glitch probably just cost a half-day for each student; "thousands" of students were affected.  That's ~$25/student/test that was probably completely wasted.  So are we talking $50,000 of tax dollars down the drain?  $100,000 (4,000 students)?


Is all of this time being spent to collect data (often of dubious quality, to be polite...) a waste and every half-day spent testing is $25/student thrown away?  (And I'm guessing between VAM tests, progress monitoring tests, and FCAT, the average Florida student spends close to a full week of school testing.)   The total opportunity cost caused by lost class time and proctoring these standardized tests must be staggering.

Or, put another way--is proctoring the FCAT worth $50 million?*  Oh, and don't forget Pearson's contract with the state--that costs you another ~$51 million a year.  I have a hard time believing this is worth it; it's probably enough to run a small school district for a year. 



*  There are 2,587,000 students in Florida's public schools.  If that distributes evenly amongst grades K-12, that works out to 199,000 students/grade.  It looks like nearly every grade above 2nd tests (at least once), so that's 10 grades, or ~2,000,000 of the students were tested every year.  So two million tests multiplied by $25/student/test yields ~$50,000,000.  (This is admittedly a pretty rough estimate with some mutant statistics.)