FCAT Child Abuse

From an entirely self-serving perspective, we have to wonder if this generation of the abused will be become the next generation of abusers and anti-empathy zealots.  After all, when I was a kid . . .

From the Miami Herald (ht to Monty Neill):

The FCAT test defines, among other things, whether students pass from third to fourth grade and ultimately whether they graduate from high school with either a standard or special diploma, or whether they will eventually have to take the GED elsewhere. All of this can determine their income range for the rest of their lives. Not only is it risky to place so many eggs in one basket, it is also unfair to evaluate all students with the same measure regardless of their disabilities (though there are some accommodations), income level and social circumstances. Margaret Cox, special education teacher at Henry F. West Laboratory Elementary School in Coral Gables, remembers a third-grade student with severe dyslexia. Even so, no changes were made except for extended time to accommodate his specific disability. He flunked, of course, but he did not have to repeat the grade because he had already been retained in kindergarten. ``This boy cried so much it broke my heart,'' she told me. ``He could not read the material, but if the text had been read aloud to him his strong comprehension abilities would have allowed him to pass.'' This accommodation is not allowed in the reading FCAT exam. Cox has seen students who in the days prior to the test have lost their hair, suffered emotional breakdowns, vomited or developed psychosomatic symptoms. A test to measure the learning achievements of students is important. But a one-size-fits-all exam cannot define their intelligence, especially if they are stressed. There are other alternatives to evaluate children's progress throughout the year. A student's value is much more than a grade on a test. That is why this FCAT imbroglio -- and its emotional consequences -- calls for a more human approach to public education in Florida. If we want our future leaders to be innovative and empathetic, we have to start training them early, making students aware that we value -- besides their academic knowledge -- their creativity, perseverance, responsibility and initiative.

Pearson: The BP of Corporate Testing

When Pearson's CEO, Peter Jovanovich, had a look at Bush's NCLB plan early in 2001, he quipped: "This almost reads like our business plan." 


Actually, it was McGraw-Hill's business plan, but now with a new Administration, Pearson is in the driver's seat, even though how it got there is a subject of an emerging investigation in Florida.  


Now they are expressing grave concern and a willingness to pay for damage caused by the spill testing screw-up.  After all, the State needs these scores so they can tell how many economically-disadvantaged children will be repeating grades next year.  From the Palm Beach Post News:

Palm Beach County School District administrators will help school officials directly mail FCAT scores to more than 80,000 students' homes as soon as the results are released by the Florida Department of Education, the district said late today .

"We want to take the burden off the schools and get the test scores out as quickly and efficiently as possible," Marc Baron, chief of performance accountability, said in a statement.

The district said NCS Pearson, the state contractor responsible for the weeks-long delay in releasing the results, has agreed to pay the cost of the mailings in Palm Beach County and statewide.

The results should by out by June 28, according to a promise that Pearson President Doug Kubach made Tuesday at a State Board of Education meeting in Orlando. The state last summer awarded Pearson a four-year, $254 million contract to administer and score the test.

From McGraw-Hill's Kelly Girls to Pearson's No Girls at All

Four years ago today I posted on the developing scandal involving McGraw-Hill's hiring of Kelly part-timers and under-qualified scorers for Florida's FCAT.  Well, now that Pearson has the $254,000,000 contract with the State of Florida, they seem to cutting corners as well. 

Reading the memo that Valerie Strauss posted from Chancellor Haithcock to public school superintendents, it is clear that Pearson does not have enough people on the job, which is the reason for the unprecedented delays in the test scores that shape everything educational in Florida.  I have clipped the relevant section from Valerie's posting:

. . . despite confidence in this year’s results, I am sure you remain curious about the cause of the delays we have been experiencing. These difficulties are directly related to Pearson’s database technology, which handles student demographic information.

Florida’s assessment process involves a great number of validation procedures, beyond the validation of students’ scores, which are designed to ensure that information in each student’s assessment record is complete and accurate. During the scanning and scoring process, database files are created by the contractor from the tests received from school districts. These files are matched against a Pre-Identification file, which contains student information reported to the contractor directly from districts prior to the testing administration. The student information contained in the test results files must match up perfectly with each district’s Pre-Identification file so that you can seamlessly integrate the test results into your student information database. It is in this file matching that our delays are occurring. Each apparent mismatch must be researched, resolved and rechecked in order to ensure accuracy. While this checking and rechecking process is clearly outlined in Pearson’s scope of work, internal systems issues within their database are causing delays in the resolution of these matches.

Additionally, I realize that you may have particular concerns with this year’s FCAT Writing results as they have been delayed the longest. The extended delay on these scores is the result of the additional validation review by Buros and the database issues mentioned above. Again, we remain fully confident in the results of this FCAT Writing administration.

I am also aware that some of you remain apprehensive about how the FCAT writing results will translate into the school grading formula. Due to the testing administration change from two essay scorers to one, a score of 3.5 is no longer possible, which necessitates a slight change in grade calculations.. . .

Not enough staff to handle the mismatches and a reduction in force from two scorers to one.  That's what $254 million gets you from the corporate swindlers.

Time to Heal the Children?

PAUL A. MOORE, PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER IN FLORIDA, FOR BUZZFLASH.COM

The children will in some cases become sick and throw up. Others will panic and wet themselves. Still others will complain of nightmares and plead for reassurance from parents and teachers. But no excuses are countenanced in the Sunshine State. The state once again went ahead with its annual ritualistic destruction of 8 and 9-year-old children this past week through the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT).

All the children psychologically injured came from families without the means to take refuge in private schools where the FCAT is banished as junk pedagogy. Thankfully, affluent parents can protect their children from the test. Poor and working class mothers and fathers are trapped though. They watch anxiously from the sidelines on test day and hope for the best.

Unfortunately, the best does not always happen. When a child "fails" the FCAT reading in the 3rd grade, and thousands do, it is the official policy in the State of Florida to punish the child. The State has rejected the idea of extra care and remediation and embraced the incentives provided by fear and public humiliation. The "failed child" sits in the same 3rd grade class again throughout the following school year. Former friends and classmates go happily on to their 4th grade adventures in learning. They will watch each other come and go every day in nearby classrooms with the full understanding of why they are now and forever separated.

Again, the State of Florida punishes the child. No adult--not a parent, not a teacher, not a principal, not a District Superintendent, not a school board member, not a Florida Commissioner of Education, not a member of the Florida Department of Education, not a legislator, not a governor--no grown person need fear any sanction for poor FCAT performance. The State of Florida has decided to punish the 9-year-old alone.

There is a sleeping giant in Florida's public schools. The teachers are the most powerful and potent force in the system. Those teachers made a huge mistake when they let the FCAT into the schools and into their students lives. But teachers were ambushed. They grew up in world without FCAT. They all went to school before punishment and psychological battering became official government education policy. As children today's teachers were taught that presidents and governors and legislators cared for all kids. It was before they learned a governor could be devious.

When teachers let the wolf, the FCAT, into their classrooms it emboldened the leaders of the pack. So they're back now to destroy those very teachers. State Senator John Thrasher and other allies of former Governor Jeb Bush have proposed Senate Bill 6. It will tie the paychecks of teachers to test scores. At first the legislation will put the jobs and livelihoods of every inner city teacher and special education teacher in jeopardy but they intend in time to get to all public school teachers.

They are out to achieve the vision of a man by the name of Milton Friedman. Sixty years ago Friedman wrote, "I believe that the only way to make a major improvement in our educational system is through privatization to the point at which a substantial fraction of all educational service is rendered to individuals by private enterprises. Nothing else will destroy or even greatly weaken the power of the educational establishment--a necessary pre-condition for radical improvement in our educational system.. . .The privatization of schooling would produce a new, highly active and profitable industry. . . ."

Senate Bill 6 is intended to work the same way FCAT did with children--batter teachers into lower pay and lesser benefits and more overcrowded classrooms through fear and intimidation. Then they will snuff out what is left of public education and install their "new, highly active and profitable industry...." And they are counting on Florida's teachers to commit suicide.

That remains to be seen. The only reason an FCAT booklet has ever been distributed in a Florida classroom is because a teacher has agreed to do it. They can pass Senate Bill 6 or Senate Bill 666 and it's null and void unless teachers administer their tests. They're prepared to deal with teachers lobbying and other forms of pleading for mercy. They won't even be bothered by thousands of sign carrying teachers marching through the streets of Tallahassee.

But imagine the teachers refusing to administer the tests. Pray tell, what would they do about it? Can they fired everybody and turn the children of Florida loose in the streets? Yes, the sleeping giant may yet awake in time to save public schools and heal the children.

FCAT Three Times a Year

The testing hysteria has reached a high pitch in Florida, where even the best school systems are falling prey to the ticking performance targets that each year blow up more public schools there. Now the insistence on a year's worth of growth has led the testing geniuses in the land of Disney to administer the disruptive, time-consuming FCAT not once, or twice, but three times during the year. From the Orlando Sentinel:

New state requirements that Florida school districts test hundreds of thousands of students this fall to develop a baseline for academic improvement is a huge, costly, time consuming exercise, Seminole school district officials complain.

Under the state’s new differentiated accountability system, the state wants school districts to show that schools are doing better by year’s ended. Targeted are schools that did not meet performance standards of No Child Left Behind, the federal education reform law.

Of course, because - as is widely accepted now - Florida shot itself in the left foot when it originally set up its tough performance standards for NCLB several years ago, few schools actually can meet the standards.

That means a district such as Seminole, which is one of the top academic performers in the state, has two-thirds of its schools on a list of underperforming schools.

They are divided into groups, based on deficiencies, with titles such as "Prevent I" and "Correct I." That makes school district officials wince, and you are unlikely to see a banner hanging outside Lake Mary Elementary proclaiming "We Are a Prevent I School."

Local officials had probably logically presumed they could use last year's FCAT test as the baseline for student perfomance. But they say the state Department of Education told them no dice, and set an impossible mid-September deadline for completion of the testing, too.

Seminole and probably other districts as well got an extension through October. But they say it will be a huge waste of teacher and student time and effort to take tests in several subjects. The tests have to be repeated at mid-year and year end as well.

Life in Florida's FCAT Factories

Just barely too old to have experienced Florida's testing work camps, here Brooke describes her sister's very different "educational" experiences in Florida schools today. From Purple States TV, a project of WaPo:

How FCAT Succeeds Where Other Social Engineering Attempts Have Failed

After 10 years of teaching the poor to recognize and accept their failure and the rightful control by others that their failure demands, Florida's corporate politicians have no doubt succeeded in padding their future supply of minimum wage workers to care for the retiring baby boomers moving South. The dropout rate is booming!

At the same time, corporate allies in Washington have used NCLB to undercut support of public education and to seed charter schools and vouchers and the cheap alternatives for these stubbornly defective children and lazy teachers who just won't help their schools make AYP. The Washington allies even put in place a phony teacher credentialing outfit to supply "teachers" in these cheap chain gangs for the poor. And Florida's corporate community stands ready to assist with big-hearted contributions that will earn dollar for dollar tax credits. Sweet!

Apparently, not everyone sees the benefits. From the Sun-Sentinel:

Take a breath. Relax.

For a day or two.

We're in the eye of the testing storm.

The squall began last week with the latest round of the FCATs. And for many, students will continue through this week with more FCAT testing and then a national test called the Norms Reference Test.

So, here we are today, smack in the middle of uncertainty and anxiety.

This is what education has become in Florida.

So many of us manipulated by an FCAT test that almost everyone agrees is faulty: Supporters say it probably needs revising, critics say it needs scrapping. And yet, this peculiar beast is entwined in the lives of thousands of children and families — most of the quarter-million kids and families who attend Broward public schools, and the 175,000 in Palm Beach County.

That's a lot of canceled baseball practices. Chores set aside. Bedtimes moved back.

If it was only those impositions and inconveniences, I might be a fan of the test.

But the FCAT also negatively affects teachers' livelihoods and kids' education. Although Broward's school board voted to de-emphasize the test, Palm Beach County took a different tack. It was all-FCAT-all-the-time.

The test even threatens successful educators and entire schools.

"We're definitely under the gun," said Rebecca Dahl, the principal at my son's middle school. "The kids know it. The teachers know it."

. . . .

The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education gave Florida a C for "learning" in its 2006 national report card. "Florida's underperformance in educating its young population could limit the state's access to a competitive workforce and weaken its economy over time," the 2006 report said. "Since the early 1990s, Florida has seen a double-digit drop in the proportion of ninth graders graduating from high school, and the state now ranks among the lowest in the country on this measure. Of those who do graduate, relatively few go on to college."

After a decade of paying with our state treasury, with our kids' psyches and teachers' sanity, is this what we hoped to hear?

That's the very first FCAT question that needs an answer.

Ralph De La Cruz can be reached at rdelacruz@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4727 or 561-243-6522. Read his blog at Sun-Sentinel.com/ralphblog

Trading Chemistry Texts for 7 Weeks of FCAT Test Prep

From the Palm Beach Post:

When Priya Mistry returned from winter break, she expected to spend the next quarter in chemistry learning about Avogadro's number and converting moles to mass. Instead, her teacher said he was throwing out the chemistry curriculum for the next seven weeks and teaching a review for the science FCAT.

"It's kind of easier than the normal chemistry would be," said the Palm Beach Gardens High junior, who's not entirely displeased. "But we're supposed to be doing chemistry. . . .

The Worm Has Turned

The sheer idiocy of the unceasing test obsession in schools is finally starting to become apparent for all to see: children who are controlled and man-handled through years of elementary school testing get to high school with a deep hatred for a practice that has robbed them of all the joy that was supposed to be a part of their earlier education. Here is just one example from Illinois:

When students in third- through eighth-grade classrooms in Whiteside County took state exams last school year, 84 percent hit the mark on tests in math and reading. In Lee County, it was 87 percent.

However, in Whiteside, only 51 percent of the county's class of 2008 high school students met basic standards on achievement tests. In Lee County, it was 61 percent of this year's seniors.

The story is similar in all 102 Illinois counties: Students perform fairly well through eighth grade but the percentage of juniors meeting state standards in high school is much lower, an Associated Press analysis of new state data shows. . . .

The message is already registering loud and clear in Broward County, Florida with a group of teachers and parents who have organized to return learning to their schools. Test prep just became optional for some. Unfortunately, poor children who are suffering most from the non-stop testing will have to wait for testing epidemic to die out further:

Efforts to reduce the FCAT frenzy kicked into full swing Tuesday as students got the chance to opt out of pre-tests and a team of educators tried to figure out how to purge the all-FCAT, all-the-time mentality from Broward County classrooms.

Tired of letting the high-stakes test consume daily classroom lessons, the School Board more than a month ago ordered the superintendent to find an answer. His plan of attack launched Tuesday.

"As a first step in the School Board's commitment to decrease the FCAT frenzy, the Benchmark Assessment Test [BAT], our district-developed assessment, will not be administered to all students this [school] year," Superintendent James Notter said in a letter to parents that was dated Tuesday.

Students who score a level 4 or 5 out of 5 on the reading and math sections of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test can pass on the district diagnostic, which is meant to measure progress but is not mandated by the state. It is given three times before FCAT testing begins in February.

The FCAT is more than a way to assess student achievement. Student graduation, teacher bonuses, funding and school image are tied to the test, which is given to third- through 11th-graders and measures progress in reading, math, writing and science. Students who score a 3 or higher are considered to read and perform math at grade level.

Parents of students who no longer must take the test but who want their kids to continue anyway must fill out a permission slip on the back of the letter and return it to school by Nov. 14, about two weeks before the next round of BAT tests begin.

Middle and high school students take the district test from Nov. 26 to Nov. 30. Elementary school students take it from Dec. 10 to 14.

"I think it's about time they did something," said parent activist Jeanne Jusevic, whose son and daughter attend Monarch High School in Coconut Creek. Her son regularly scores 4's in reading and math on the FCAT but "Christmas trees" the district's test, she said.

"He is so sick of the test, that he just fills it out," she said. "We really have caused school to be a painful experience for student and teachers."

Jusevic was one of about 20 parents, teachers, principals, students and district administrators who met Tuesday to determine ways to prepare students for the state's high stakes test without hurting other classroom lessons.

This was the first of several meetings that will occur over the next four months, and Tuesday the group created its mission: "How does the district transition from a FCAT prep environment focus to an environment where quality teaching of the curriculum is the focus?"

Several ideas came up, such as preparing high school students for college-entrance exams, which can be used in place of the FCAT for those students who are on track to graduate but failed the state's test. Also, creating a survey to ask students and teachers what they think would work best and developing a pilot program to see how schools would fare if they focused solely on curriculum.

"It's a real indication that enough is enough," said Deputy Superintendent Earlean Smiley. "We have to find another way to put the human element back into teaching and learning."

Jeb Bush and "integrity that is unquestioned"

The Palm Beach Post reports that Jeb Bush was sworn in on Friday by Maggie Spellings as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board. Exhibiting the sharp contrasts that can be found among siblings, Jeb describes himself as " an aspiring policy nerd" and as "an amateur psychometrician." But there is one strand of his thinking that puts him on the same page with his brother--his insistence on the infallability of tests as the true measure of learning. He is quoted, too, as claiming infallability for the FCAT, the state test that Florida uses each year to ethnically cleanse the losers in the testing bonanza that was once known as school in Florida:

"We're dispelling a lot of myths in our state about how kids can learn... and the core of all of this is assessment. . . .Without an assessment tool that has integrity that is unquestioned, you can't challenge the basic assumptions."

Some readers may find good reason to remain skeptical about Bush's absurd claim, particularly when taken together with less amateur psychometricians such as James Popham, Professor Emeritus from UCLA, who spent more than 40 years studying and developing tests. At a conference I attended recently, Popham described 90% of the tests used now to make high stakes decisions on NCLB mandates as "junk." Read an excellent interview with Jim Popham here. Popham still believes there is much to learned with good tests, but he insists that the belief in tests as the true measure of school quality is folly:

The most profound misuse of educational tests these days is to employ a traditionally constructed standardized achievement test and base the student's scores, use those scores, as a reflection of school quality. These tests should not be used to evaluate school quality. And many citizens think that should be done and many educators can't disabuse them of that notion, because they don't know better.

If Florida teachers were to believe their governor, they would never know better. Fortunately, Florida teachers are coming to understand the lunacy of the state testing policy and the conscious intellectual and emotional genocide that is being waged against children of poverty.