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Fighting for the fourth grade

Tiffany is an honor roll student who faces another year of third grade and her first big failure after flunking two reading tests required for fourth-grade promotion. She has one final shot.

SPRING HILL - Alicia McGuire didn't need to ask why her daughter Tiffany had come home from school crying.

Tiffany's teacher had called earlier on the last day of classes with the news: The Chocachatti Elementary School third-grader had earned all A's and B's, but she also had not passed the second-chance national test that would have let her move into fourth grade.

She missed by two points.

Suddenly, making the school honor roll seemed to lose its luster. The auburn-haired, freckle-faced 9-year-old who loves to read and punishes herself for bad grades stood face to face with failure.

It said so, right there on the report card Tiffany tossed at her mom: "Behavior met expectations. Academics at grade level. Retained."

"I've never failed anything in my life!" Tiffany shouted during an interview. "I want to keep going to the next grade and the next grade. It's good because you get to learn more."

But first, Tiffany must prove she deserves it. That means two weeks of summer school, where she and her teacher will prepare a folder showing that Tiffany's grades were no fluke - that she really can read at grade level.

"This is it," said her dad, Joseph McGuire, "and there's no guarantees."

School districts across Florida scrambled to create summer "reading camps" after learning that thousands of third-graders scored below grade level on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test reading section.

The intense remedial work will offer one last chance to children who otherwise will be forced to repeat third grade by Gov. Jeb Bush's insistence that "social promotion" be stopped.

Through the camps, children who failed the FCAT can try a second test, called the SAT-9, if they haven't taken it already. Those who fail that test, too, can have their teacher create a portfolio showing their reading mastery.

The portfolio is a student's final shot for a "good cause" promotion. It's what Tiffany, who took the SAT-9 before school ended, has pinned her hopes to.

Michael Tellone, Tiffany's principal at Chocachatti Elementary School, said he asked all third-grade teachers at his school to prepare portfolios for every student, just in case.

"But we were going in blindly," he admitted. "We didn't know what the specifics would be."

As a result, many documents went home, lost forever. Others simply didn't exist.

"Frankly, the summer program is bailing us out by refining what the portfolio has to look like," Tellone said.

While he would not comment about Tiffany's specific situation, he said he generally supported the portfolio alternative. After all, he said, low test scores do not necessarily correlate to a lack of knowledge.

Rather, a student might have felt pressure or test anxiety. Perhaps he simply needed more time for the exam; maybe she was not having a good day.

"That's the fallacy of the one-test measurement," Tellone said. "It cannot adequately give an accurate picture of a child's performance for the whole year."

Tiffany and her parents never had any indication she was doing anything but well at Chocachatti. If they had, Alicia McGuire said, they would have hired tutors and found additional help much earlier.

Tiffany, who considers a C grade a disaster, would have insisted on it.

So when they learned that she had scored at the lowest level on the FCAT, the family jumped to action. They enrolled Tiffany in an intensive reading program, where a teacher would pull her from her regular classroom for individualized review. They bought workbooks and study guides for home. They read together every night.

Anything to prepare for the SAT-9, the test the state put in place as a backstop to the FCAT.

"I felt bad," Alicia McGuire acknowledged later. "The (neighborhood) kids were here swimming in the pool, and we were in here working and working."

All of the attention paid to SAT-9 studies had another, unintended, effect. It freaked Tiffany out. Passing consumed her. She ate poorly, slept restlessly.

Even after taking the test, she said, the questions haunted her dreams.

"I woke up in the middle of the night," she said. "I was worried. I ran to Mommy."

"She was kind of replaying the test in her head," Alicia McGuire said, filling in where Tiffany left off. "She was trying to figure out where she went wrong."

That was before getting the results, which came the last day of school.

After seeing Tiffany's score, the McGuires questioned whether their good intentions had backfired.

"Maybe what we did was wrong," Joseph McGuire said, pain evident in his caring eyes. "Maybe we shoved it down her throat. We drilled her, and the school drilled her. Maybe we put too much pressure on her."

They vowed not to do the same thing again.

Joseph McGuire toyed with the idea of not sending Tiffany to summer school to work on her portfolio. Why, he reasoned, should he set her up for devastation times three?

After talking to Tellone, he relented, but only because it's his daughter's only remaining choice. He refuses to pump her up.

"There is no guarantee," Joseph McGuire repeated.

Instead, Tiffany has spent the week leading up to summer school doing some of her favorite activities - gymnastics camp, playing with friends, swimming.

She devours books as if they were Cheetos, her favorite, and hangs out with best friend Samantha.

Mom, meanwhile, has tried to make summer school seem special by taking Tiffany to the mall for a "back to school" spree. Tiffany bragged about the new shirts, shorts and Nikes she got from JCPenney.

Anything, Alicia McGuire said, to make the whole ordeal "not so awful."

Still, it looms.

"I've been thinking a lot" about summer school, Tiffany said Thursday, between making and eating homemade tacos. "It's going to be easy. I'm not even nervous. That's what I told my mom. She goes, "You're not? Yes, you are.' I say, "No, I'm not.' "

"Why do you talk about it all the time?" Mom asked.

"Because I like to," Tiffany responded. "If there's reading games, that is going to be fun. If there's work you have to do, I don't care. I want to pass. I want to go to fourth grade."

Anne Robertson, coordinator of the National Parent Information Network at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the McGuires and parents like them should not despair or feel helpless, even when they feel the state has stacked the odds against their child.

"Parents do have a lot of say and ability to advocate for their children," Robertson said. "It shouldn't be viewed as an adversarial process. The parents are part of the teaching team."

The McGuires wish it were that easy.

They see their little girl, who still gets excited about a handful of sour Mega WarHeads candy, getting strung out by a system they consider foisted on her by a bunch of nonteachers with an agenda in Tallahassee.

"We have nothing else to do. We have no control over this," Joseph McGuire said plaintively.

"That's what is killing us," his wife added.

"Do you know what it is like, when she comes in and lies on my chest in bed, and she cries that she doesn't want to stay in third grade?" Joseph McGuire said, shaking his head.

"That she doesn't want to be in school, from someone who loves school," Alicia McGuire said. "If she has to be retained, I want to know who is going to be the one to tell her. . . . I don't want to be the one."

They're talking seriously about taking Tiffany out of public school if she is told to repeat third grade. Tiffany doesn't like the idea of leaving her school or her friends behind.

Tiffany used to want to be a teacher. But since all of this happened, she has changed her mind. Now, she wants to be a lawyer.

- Jeffrey S. Solochek covers education and politics in Hernando County. He can be reached at 754-6115 or solochek@sptimes.com