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has misused it, it's the politicians whose misguided policies have misused it, much to the detriment of our kids. Us parents and are students are, unfortunately, just along for the roller coaster ride. And I think the point of the article is that JEB! and his cronies on the education commission are reaping exactly what they have sown by pushing the FCAT as a measure for punishing and funding schools and now say, oh, wait, it's not a diagnostic tool. Tell me something most of us parents didn't aleady know. And the parents in the comments are blaming others, they are venting their frustration with a system that isn't really teaching our kids effectively.
My main point, and the one that the article missed, is that nobody ever said that the FCAT was a "diagnostic tool"--including the politicians making policy about the test's implementation. It was never designed as a diagnostic tool and it has never been used as a diagnostic tool. "Diagnostic tool" = instrument used to identify a struggling student's specific problems so specific remedies may be prescribed.
The FCAT was designed as and has been used as an evaluative tool. This means it's supposed to measure outcomes to determine whether students, schools, and districts have achieved what they set out to achieve and to what degree. What the politicians have done wrong is using the results of the FCAT in educationally unsound ways. That is, they have used it (or in some cases tried to use it) as a sole determining factor for deciding such things as whether a child should be promoted to the next grade, whether a school receives funding, and whether a teacher gets a raise. This is not only educationally unsound, it's plain stupid. None of these decisions should be made on the results of a single test. No test is perfect and the flaws in any test would make such practice bad practice.
My point about schools and parents misusing the FCAT and the state's failure to educate them otherwise about the test refers to the focus in many schools and, consequently, among many parents on test prep. The FCAT is designed to measure whether children have reached the "Sunshine State Standards" in various content areas for their grade level. Teach the content to these standards, and children will be able to perform well on the test. Teach to the test, and children may or may not be able to do well on the test, and may or may not have mastered the content to the level intended by the standards.
The state is not telling schools to teach to the test--in fact, the state has attempted at least to let schools know this is a bad idea. Schools that don't know better ways to help children reach the standards and that feel the pressures the state imposes for achieving well on the test rely on test prep as their only hope for success. This is a serious problem. The problem, however, is deeper than the existence of the FCAT or even its implementation. The problem is that schools and teachers are, in general, woefully ill prepared to do their job. Teachers who know what they are doing refuse to spend endless hours on test prep and, instead, focus on teaching kids what they need to know and be able to do at a given grade level. Those kids, in turn, perform well on the FCAT. Teachers who don't know what they are doing must rely on test prep, and the schools that hire these teachers promote that because they see that's the only way to get the scores they need.
The state has blamed the colleges of education in the state for the lack of preparedness of Florida's teachers, but all evidence shows that graduates of the state's university teacher education programs are among the most qualified teachers in the state. They are the ones who refuse to engage in those endless hours of test prep and whose students perform well anyway. The ill-prepared teachers are the ones that the state has deemed "highly qualified" by virtue of a passing score on a ridiculously easy teacher certification exam. Any regular in the Lounge who holds a bachelor's degree could become a certified teacher in the state of Florida tomorrow by passing this test. Scary thought, huh?
The underlying problem is that the state refuses to examine why we are unable to attract and retain teachers who actually are qualified to do the job. We have a chronic shortage of teachers in Florida. Yet, there are three times as many people with teacher preparation and certification than there are positions that are vacant or staffed by unqualified people. Unfortunately, these qualified people aren't teaching. They are working at Dillards, they are starting their own businesses, they are going back to school in a different field, they are selling real estate, they are staying home to raise kids, they are doing anything other than teaching Florida's kids. When we have looked at why this is, the answers are the same over and over again. Too much work for too little pay. It's not that these folks are lazy. In fact, their alternative career choices generally prove the opposite. It's that the expectations of teachers in Florida are ridiculous. We have a class-size amendment that has a ridiculous number of Bush-sanctioned methods for skirting it. We have a bloated school bureaucracy with an absurd amount of unnecessary paperwork and too many people employed outside the classroom. We have micromanaging school boards who know absolutely nothing about teaching dictating what teachers can and cannot do. Teaching is very hard work and, in the state of Florida, teachers make less relative to the cost of living than in most places in the country. The fact that our teachers could (and often do) move to Georgia of all places and make, on average, $10,000-15,000 more per year is a sad statement about how little Florida values public education. A teacher I know moved from a poor, rural district in Florida to an even poorer rural district in Georgia and is making $14,000 more per year.
Until we address this much bigger problem, we will see no improvement in how schools deal with the FCAT. The only alternative is to lower standards for kids so that our ill-prepared teachers can actually achieve the standards. I can't imagine that any reasonable person would support that move.
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BabySister
(72.155.80.129) on 11/22/2006 - 7:12 a.m. says: ( 123 views
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