Now we see the price of education by numbers

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By HOWARD TROXLER

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 18, 2001

Mrs. Rabbitt, one of the high-school English teachers I visited a couple of weeks ago, told me about the experience shared by two of her 10th-graders on the writing portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.

Both of them read the assigned question, which was something like:

Invent your own holiday, and describe how it would be celebrated.

Both of them, decent students, froze up. One of them spent her time staring at the blank page and crying.

Now, from that test, do we conclude: These students have not achieved! Their school is failing! Their teacher is failing!

Yes. Sure.

That is the policy of Florida, set by our governor and Legislature.

Our policy says:

The way to measure our public schools is with standardized tests, tests and more tests.

If a school's test scores are good, the school is a good school, and gets a cash reward.

If a school's scores are bad enough, it is a failing school. Instead of fixing it, we will give tax dollars to parents to take their kids to other schools.

If the parents choose a private school, we will automatically assume it is better, and not require proof.

We will begin to pay our teachers, in part, based on their students' test scores -- no matter how far behind the curve those students were when their teacher first received them.

As for the students, the purpose of these tests is to declare success and failure. Fail the test, don't graduate.

My mind and heart return to another of Mrs. Rabbitt's classes, ninth-graders diagnosed as reading between second- and sixth-grade level. She is working heroically to help them.

Next year they will take the 10th-grade state test and they will be mowed down like the bad guys in a gangster movie. And we will be able to say, smugly: Ooh, this is a problem school! This is a problem teacher!

That is the policy of the state of Florida, because the state of Florida in all things seeks the simplistic, the snap solution and the easy answer.

So, how should we now react to the news that two schools in Hernando County are offering direct cash payments to students for good test scores?

We should be forced to admit that it is consistent with Florida's policy that tests are what matter most.

So why not cash?

We already bribe them with gift certificates, field trips and other rewards.

We already hang a sword over their heads in the form of "zero tolerance" policies, in which kids get hauled out of class in handcuffs for drawing the wrong cartoon.

We already have shifted the focus of classroom teaching from a broad-based, general education to What You Need to Know for the Test. It is education via Cliff's Notes.

And you know what? Under the rules set up by those who write the rules, the FCAT is working. It is producing exactly the desired result -- namely, higher FCAT scores.

It turns out that public schools, under threat of being labeled a failure, can be forced to drill the test's essential facts and figures into the students' skulls. Maybe that is progress.

The writing portion of the FCAT has forced the schools to drill a style of "power writing" so students can crank out that 45-minute essay. And though it is formulaic and slavish, you can argue that is progress, too.

So why not pay the students for it?

There is an answer to that question.

The answer is that it crosses a line that we ought not cross -- a line of crassness, a line of surrender of something important. I saw in the paper that the governor is uncomfortable with the idea. He should be; it is his doing.

- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.

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