Megan Laitinen quit high school for many reasons, but failing the FCAT may have been the biggest.
"You take the test, you're just like, "Ahhhh,' " she said. "I don't like to fail."
Now the 19-year-old Seminole resident is enrolled in a GED class, hoping to earn an alternative diploma that is widely considered inferior.
She is surrounded by other teenagers.
The General Education Development test was created decades ago as a second chance for adult dropouts. But since the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test became a graduation requirement last year, the number of teenagers taking the GED has skyrocketed, putting Florida in the forefront of a troubling national trend.
One reason for the increase is obvious, education experts say: Many of the 27,000 high school seniors who failed the FCAT in the past two years are turning to the next best thing, the GED, which comedian Chris Rock calls the "Good Enough Diploma."
At the same time, the test that symbolizes Gov. Jeb Bush's school reform efforts is helping to drive out struggling students such as Laitinen, with some of them resurfacing in GED classes, educators say.
"There's only so much frustration most young people will subject themselves to," said Clayton Wilcox, the incoming superintendent of Pinellas County schools. "That's the ugly underbelly of accountability."
Between 2002 and 2003, the number of teens taking the GED in Florida jumped 78 percent, according to figures from the state Department of Education. In raw numbers, the total grew from about 12,000 to 21,000.
Department spokesman MacKay Jimeson said the FCAT isn't to blame. He cites other changes in graduation requirements, including higher grade point averages and increased credit requirements.
But those changes went into effect years ago, long before the spike in GED test-takers.
"Unfortunately, we still have kids in the system who have been affected, negatively, by the old system, which did not have high standards and accountability," Jimeson said.
Nationwide, the percentage of 16- to 19-year-olds taking the GED test rose from 32.8 percent of the total test-taking population in 1991 to 38.4 percent in 2001, the last year for which national data is available, according to the GED Testing Service in Washington.
In Florida, the numbers jumped from 31 percent to 47 percent between 2002 and 2003 alone, meaning nearly one in every two people taking the GED is under 20 years old.
More than 900 of them were 16 years old, the youngest age eligible.
"I'm not surprised," said Debby VanderWoude, the administrator of Dixie Hollins Adult Education Center in Pinellas County, where 630 people earned GED diplomas last year, four times as many as 1999. "We've been seeing a whole lot more of the younger ones."
The younger ones tend to do well: In 2003, 81 percent of Florida teens who took the GED passed it.
Many experts expect the numbers to keep rising.
In Texas, the number of GED takers grew at more than twice the national rate in the early to mid 1990s, which is when the Lone Star State began using a test similar to FCAT.
In other states, authorities have made the GED route more attractive to teenagers by lowering the age requirements or shrinking the amount of time dropouts must wait before taking it.
It's no coincidence those changes parallel accountability reforms, said Duncan Chaplin, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank that follows education trends.
With stricter standards, "there might be a need to give kids an out," he said.
Many employers do not value the GED as much as a standard diploma, and studies show GED earners are more likely to quit college, work low-skill jobs and make less money. But it is difficult to enroll in college or get hired for many basic jobs without it, and many who study for a GED seek a sense of accomplishment they could not get otherwise.
In Florida, high school students are offered six chances to pass the FCAT, but many still fail.
Kathy Paeplow, a GED instructor at the Seminole campus of St. Petersburg College, said one of her new students flunked the FCAT repeatedly despite a solid B average. The young woman fulfilled all of her other graduation requirements.
"She doesn't know what else to do to do better," Paeplow said.
The FCAT isn't Florida's first graduation test. In 2002, about 10,500 seniors failed FCAT's predecessor, the High School Competency Test, and "no one said a word," said Education Department spokeswoman Frances Marine.
The FCAT was designed to be more challenging, but some complain it's still too easy.
Achieve Inc., a national nonprofit that backs higher education standards, recently concluded the FCAT is not "overly demanding" and reflects "modest expectations."
In 2003, about 13,000 12th-graders failed the FCAT. This year, about 14,000 did.
Some critics contend GED rates aren't rising by accident.
In recent years, funding, salaries and school reputations have been increasingly tied to student performance on standardized tests. That is prompting eductors around the country to push problem students out of school so they don't bring down a school's overall test scores, said Walt Haney, an education professor at Boston College.
With sanctions imposed by the federal No Child Left Behind law now kicking in, "it's just getting worse," Haney said.
The pushout theory has been raised by critics in other states, and the notion persists in Florida, even if evidence is scarce.
"Yes, that's happening," said Watson Haynes, a community activist in St. Petersburg. "That's the fear factor being placed on the schools."
In Broward County last month, students told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel they were forced into a GED class at South Plantation High School, a charge administrators called bogus.
Many of the 45 students had grade point averages in the "zero point zero something range," said Keith Bromery, a spokesman for Broward County schools. Without a GED class, "they were going to drop out of school without any kind of diploma."
