One Pinellas County elementary school has performed so well that it deserves a bonus, or so poorly that parents should be able to withdraw their children - it depends which Bush is speaking.
Published July 31, 2003
Gov. Jeb Bush says that Gulfport Elementary School did so well academically last year it is a due for a state bonus check of roughly $40,000. President George W. Bush says Gulfport Elementary School has performed so poorly that its parents must be allowed, less than a week before school begins, to pull their children out.
Which brother is right?
The question is amusing in a political sense, given that the famous brothers both claim to corner the market on education reform, but don't expect Gulfport principal Lisa Grant to share the laugh. She's been forced to mail out letters to parents without knowing why. "I guess it's hard because we don't have the data yet to look at," she told a reporter. "We need to look at it and determine which groups are making progress and which ones aren't."
The question of whether the Florida A+ Education Plan or the federal No Child Left Behind Act more accurately assesses Gulfport and 2,593 other schools in this state assumes, of course, that either one of them really knows what goes on inside the school. They don't. They know only the results of one set of standardized tests, taken by fewer than half the students, once a year. The state takes those results and looks mostly at the bottom line, though it considers the performance of the lowest-achieving students. The federal government takes the results and breaks them down by "at-risk" groups - such as racial and ethnic students, those with limited English skills and those whose families are poor - and flunks an entire school if any single group doesn't measure up.
These competing versions of accountability contribute to such confusion that even those who work within education are often at a loss to explain them. It also doesn't help that they are thrown at school systems in untimely and unproductive ways. Gov. Bush insisted, for example, that his own A+ Plan be applied retroactively to schools when it was adopted in 1999. President Bush is now insisting that districts allow students to transfer to other schools within days of the start of a new school year, as though bus routes and class schedules don't matter.
In Pinellas, the transfer option is also placed into the context of a federal court agreement that establishes race ratios and a new choice assignment plan that allows students to pick their schools anyway. In other states, the transfer edict has proved even more incoherent. The nearest school for students in Savoonga, Alaska, is four hours by snowmobile. The other option, Nome, is 164 miles across the Bering Sea. U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige, who toured Alaska at the state's insistence, remarked: "When you said "rural' to me several days ago, it meant one thing. When you say it to me now, it means a different thing."
This is random reform at its worst, pushing and pulling school districts, rewarding and punishing schools based on a narrow appraisal of their work. The FCAT results can provide a revealing glimpse into how well all students are performing, but they don't equip bureaucrats in Washington or Tallahassee to make accurate judgments about whether teachers at each school are doing their jobs. That's where accountability breaks down. A federal government that tells parents to yank their children from Gulfport Elementary, based solely on the results of a standardized test, is engaging in its own form of educational malpractice.
The letters mailed to parents at Gulfport and 47 other Florida schools are only the start of this perplexing educational divide. Next week, the state is scheduled to release the list of all schools that are failing to meet, as the federal government terms it, "adequate yearly progress." Early indications suggest as many as half the schools may make that list. That's 50 percent deemed failing in a state where Gov. Bush recently graded only 6 percent as below average.
Paige recently told Congress that the approval of 50 separate state education accountability plans is "truly a watershed moment in the history of American education." At Gulfport Elementary, it may feel more like water torture.
