Despite the governor's insistence, a standardized test is not the best way to assess teacher performance or determine student advancement.
Published May 9, 2003
Test scores in Florida schools are improving. That trend could be greeted with greater enthusiasm if Gov. Jeb Bush weren't so intent on distorting and misusing the results. But the release of Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test third-grade reading scores moves the state into its most perilous high-stakes educational arena yet.
Forget school grades, vouchers and school bonuses. The FCAT is now deciding whether a 9-year-old should be forced to repeat third grade.
The governor tried this week to downplay the effect on schoolchildren, suggesting that only "some" of the 43,000 students who failed the reading portion of the FCAT will be held back in third grade next year. He also noted that some of the 13,800 seniors who failed the high school FCAT may still get a diploma. But that is not the intent of his own accountability plan, the rules written by his Board of Education or the law he supported to ban social promotion. The law says one test will decide the fate of third-graders and seniors, and the rules provide little room for departure.
The governor's stated objective is to eliminate "social promotion," a practice that can indeed have a corrosive effect on learning. In some cases, children are promoted without having learned requisite skills, which can set them up for later failure.
The problem with his solution is that decisions on promotion, especially with third-graders, turn on many individualized factors: overall performance during the school year, mastery of various skills, prospects for remediation, attitude and commitment to improve, emotional and physical maturity. The one-test-decides-all approach leaves little room for individual assessment.
In announcing the latest FCAT results, the governor and his education commissioner, Jim Horne, also demonstrated how little attention they have paid to anything other than standardized tests. The performance deadlines for third-graders and seniors have been known for two to four years, and educators have warned the impact could be severe. Yet the best Horne could offer was the creation of a Web site and toll-free number for seniors who failed the FCAT. Bush criticized the Legislature for failing to pass an alternative diploma plan the governor himself never offered.
More to the point, the state has given school districts no real way to provide better instruction for the students having trouble. Just three weeks ago, Horne wrote school superintendents around the state, essentially ordering them to "provide research-based intensive summer reading activities for students who have failed to meet third-grade promotion standards." Yet the state provided no money, and the Legislature has proposed cutting remedial programs by $100-million beginning July 1. And Horne's edict came within a month of the end of school for many districts.
Is this any way to run an education system?
There is a place in an education accountability system for the kind of testing and scolding in which Bush places so much faith. But it has limits, which is one reason few, if any, private schools follow the same approach. Standardized tests can help teachers identify students who have needs and help education officials examine trends. They are not capable of discerning whether a classroom teacher is performing good or bad work or whether a 9-year-old is fit to advance to the next grade, no matter how much the governor pretends otherwise.
The choice here doesn't have to be between social promotion or political demotion. But a more exacting, and enduring, solution would require the governor to place some trust in teachers and their assessments of how well their students are progressing. Instead, politicians are making the call and schoolchildren are ending up as pawns.
