By not allowing learning disabled children to use devices to help them show their knowledge, they might fail the tests that would take away their chance to get into college.

Learning-disabled children who already get a raw deal from Florida's FCAT test are about to get another from the Legislature, where a House committee chairman has set his mind to killing a bill that would give them a fair chance at getting into college.

Here's the problem: Learning aids allowed in the classroom, and in every other test including the SAT, are mostly forbidden, by the whim of the Department of Education, for use on the FCAT. So a blind student who relies on a talking calculator in the classroom must make do with an abacus for the most important test of her young life. If the student hasn't mastered braille, too bad. The Department allows students to take the critical reading comprehension test only by sight or touch. That goes for kids with dyslexia, too.

Failure to pass, regardless of the reason, precludes a standard high school diploma and virtually rules out admission to any college. This is much too high a price, much too cruel a consequence to pay for exalting form over substance, rules over reason. The test should be about what students have learned, not how adroitly they can demonstrate it.

The unfairness is underscored by the fact that the FCAT scores of these learning-disabled students don't even figure in the school's rating under the governor's A+

plan. Only the individual students suffer. What's the sense in that?

Three committees, one in the House and two in the Senate, have approved legislation (CS SB 1156 and HB 659, by Sen. Stephen Wise, R-Jacksonville and Rep. Loranne Ausley, D-Tallahassee) to guarantee these children the same accommodations on the FCAT test as they receive in the classroom. Federal law, they say, requires this. The committees responded to desperate pleas from parents and advocates, some of whom told of public school teachers advising them to put their children in private schools, where the FCAT does not apply.

"It's interesting to me," remarked Patricia H. Hardman, director of a Tallahassee private school and of a dyslexia institute, "that the Department of Education hasn't found anyone to speak against the bill except bureaucrats in Tallahassee."

Charlie Crist's bureaucrats have, however, found Rep. Jerry Melvin, R-Crestview, chairman of the House Council for Lifelong Learning, who refused to hear the bill and kept it from being withdrawn from his committee. It might still have a chance, however, if the Senate were to take it up swiftly and send it to the House with an emphatic vote, which we urge the Senate to do. Next year is not soon enough. Hundreds of children need it now.

It is odd, indeed, that such a bill would have trouble amid so many legislators who claim to mistrust the education bureaucracy and who vote for every voucher bill that comes along on the premise that it's about empowering parents. Is there some secret agenda to drive learning-disabled children out of the public schools altogether?

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