The FCAT sham

Despite the progress in Florida schools under the A-Plus plan, many made only adequate gains at the federal level.

How embarrassing for Gov. Jeb Bush. His own brother has blown the whistle on Jeb’s FCAT school “reform” sham.

In Tallahassee, Team Bush has been bragging about the governor’s miraculous resurrection of public education with his A-Plus reform plan. As proof in the pudding, under Jeb’s pedantic tutelage, the number of “A” schools in Florida has increased dramatically, from just 202 in 1999 to an astounding 1,230 this year.

But wait a minute. Now comes brother George with his own education reform blueprint - the No Child Left Behind Act. And by brother George’s calculations, only 13 percent of Florida’s public schools have made “adequate” progress in improving student achievement. Among those that have not sufficiently progressed are 78 percent of Florida’s A schools.

Which raises an interesting question: How can a school simultaneously be rated A and yet still be judged to have made inadequate progress in educating its students?

Here in Alachua County, only half a dozen of the district’s 21 A schools are deemed to have made adequate progress by federal reckoning. Among the schools that did not make adequate progress are 16 district elementary schools that receive Title I money because they have large numbers of students living in poverty.

Oddly, both reform plans use standardized testing, the FCAT, to determine progress. But Jeb’s A-Plus uses the FCAT in simplistic fashion to judge a school by how well its student body as a whole performs, while brother George’s plan breaks down the FCAT results to more closely examine how various student subgroups - ethnic groups, students from low-income families, those with disabilities or who speak English as a second language, and so on - are faring…{{link http://gainesville.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20030814/EDITORIALS/208140332/ MORE}}

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