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Other states are beginning to realize the limitations of imposing educational standards by means of testing. Florida's leaders should pay attention to this lesson.
Political calculations no doubt motivated the state Board of Education to back off higher test standards next year, an election year, but the decision is still encouraging. Five years into a reform plan that flunks schools and students based on their performance on one standardized test, the people in charge were willing Tuesday to temper their machismo with a dose of practical reality.
Of note, Education Commissioner Jim Horne, who tends to make schools sound as if they are factories in need of production quotas, offered a valuable human insight. "Students who had not performed well are starting to feel confidence," he said. "I don't want to pull the rug out from under them."
Good for the commissioner. The FCAT, used correctly, is supposed to help students gauge their academic progress, not punish them.
In Florida, though, the FCAT has serious consequences and its use is constantly changing. The standards by which the state grades schools have changed four times in five years, and the use of FCAT to flunk third-grade students and deny diplomas to seniors is only 1 year old. Neither students, families, teachers, nor administrators have been given ample time to adapt to the ever-changing testing landscape. As such, waiting a few years to increase the passing scores for reading and math can only help.
Such a pause is not a sign of "lower standards," as the lone board holdout, Boca Raton investment banker Charles Garcia, lamented. Just the opposite. It could be a welcome recognition that any system of educational testing and accountability has to ultimately be judged as fair if the public is to support it. As Mark Christie, the Republican-appointed president of the Virginia Board of Education, recently told the New York Times: "If you create a system that calls a good school a bad school, people will know and lose faith in accountability."
Virginia introduced its own testing system a year earlier than Florida and discovered quickly that rigid formulas led to skewed results. In the first year, only 2 percent of the schools were rated as "fully accredited." The board reacted, in part, by seeking meaningful alternatives for judging success.
With the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush and Congress have entered the ratings game in ways that only create further confusion. This year, for example, Florida graded 70 percent of its schools as A or B and just 1 percent as an F. The U.S. Department of Education, on the other hand, reported that 87 percent of the schools failed to meet "adequate yearly progress."
For obvious reasons, Horne and Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, try to defend the rationality of these contradictory grading schemes. Christie, in Virginia, is more upfront. The federal formula, which mandates that every single student pass the test by 2014, "is irrational and violates common sense."
Worse, he says that federal bureaucrats refuse to listen: "You complain and they say, "That's the law.' "
Florida too often has turned a deaf ear as well. One reason Horne and Bush still encounter so much resistance to their testing approach is that they typically dismiss critics, including dedicated educators, as though they were political enemies and apologists for the status quo. They too often treat disillusioned parents and students as though they were whiners.
When an education commissioner says he wants to slow things down because he worries about the psychological impact on schoolchildren, though, he is saying he is willing to listen.
That's promising.