Accountability
The Local Puppy Trainer reports on the unpleasant surprise just handed out to Florida schools: Statewide FCAT drop worse than expected
In the fourth grade alone, only 27 percent of students earned a proficient score on the standardized test. That’s a 54 percent drop compared to last year. Similar trends occurred in eighth and tenth grade.
FCAT is the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test, which is supposed to impose ‘accountability’ on the public school system by providing a ‘metric’ to judge performance. Testing, which involves big buck contracts to private companies, like the one owned by the brother of our former governor, John Ellis Bush, were supposed to provide an objective yardstick to judge the quality of schools. The fact that it only showed how well a school could ‘teach to a test’ is irrelevant as it gave politicians a reason to continue to reduce funding to education.
Well, they changed the test, and the way the test is graded, and schools haven’t mastered teaching to the new test, so scores have dropped like a rock. What we don’t know is if the kids are actually learning anything, or if they can think for themselves.
Update: Florida’s Board of Education has ‘fixed’ the problem – they lowered the score need to pass.
Essentially the change in the test for writing skills was to begin grading spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Before the test was just scored on the ability to present a reasoned argument in written form. It really amounted to creating a wordy outline, rather than a finished essay.
2 comments
“Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”
Even more rarely is the question truthfully answered, “Yes.”
High-stakes testing is about as ineffective and destructive a way of evaluating educational results as one could imagine. But I don’t expect it to be abandoned as long as someone is making money off of it, presumably at taxpayers’ expense.
I’m updating to include the method of resolving the problem with the results – they lowered to passing score.