What do you get when you cross a former governor with financial interests in the education industry, a current governor who consistently works with teabaggers in the legislature to make public education so unpalatable and so underfunded that it’s buckling at the knees, and Florida’s school kids who spend much of their year prepping for a test in which they drop over 50 points in ONE year? You get an educational system that is dropping like a stone to the bottom of the barrel nationally (admittedly, it didn’t have far to go), teacher morale that has plummeted, frustrated or bored students, and disheartened AND angry parents. You also get taxpayers left paying the bill to Pearson, the go-to company of choice for educational testing, which received a $254 million contract through 2013 to administer AND score the FCAT.
On Tuesday, Floridians were apprised of the early results of the standardized writing test that Florida’s 4th, 8th, and 10th graders take, known as FCAT Writes. Last year, 81% of students taking the test earned a 4 or better, out of a 6-point scale, meaning they had “passed” the test. This year, 27% of 4th graders passed. Yep, that’s right, 27%. 8th and 10th graders scored only slightly higher at 33% and 38% respectively. The same state that boasted of its pass rate in 2011 was shame-faced to report the results in 2012. What happened? Did Florida’s teachers forget how to teach to a test? Did Florida’s students just become stupid in one year? No, but the State Board of Education sure screwed up, and Tuesday afternoon, they reluctantly voted to LOWER the passing score to a 3 out of 6, so that approximately 81% of the students will pass this year. They’re grading on a curve. Why are they grading on the curve? Because the FCAT has so many tentacles to other elements of education in Florida, so that when the FCAT shows us to be invalid, it affects many other things.
In the spring of 2011, the Florida legislature and our lizard governor passed a bill into law that would eventually substantially tie the results of FCAT scores (including writing with reading, math, and science) to teacher salaries beginning in 2012.
In addition, FCAT scores also determine individual schools’ “grades”. An “A” school gets extra funds, gets to tout its achievements, allows realtors to show off the neighborhood as one with “good schools”, and provides educators and administrators affirmation of what they are doing right. Anything below an “A” is embarrassing, but an “F” can be fatal. It requires the district to set up remediation programs for students in those schools costing the district extra money it doesn’t have, and ultimately it can mean that teachers are replaced by “new” teachers who surely must be better than the ones that resulted in the school getting an “F” grade. What it doesn’t take into account is the myriad of other variables that go into why students score the way they do on standardized tests: the home environment, their English-language skills, their learning disabilities, their absenteeism, and their life experiences (as I will demonstrate below).
In July of 2011, the State Board of Education, with the urging of Jeb Bush’s educational foundation, Florida’s Future, and the Florida Chamber of Commerce, reset the goalposts on FCAT Writes, establishing the same pass score, but dramatically increasing the competencies students needed to demonstrate in their essay. Previously, they had 45 minutes to write a rough draft that demonstrated main ideas, supporting details, a strong introduction, and a conclusion that reiterated their points. This year, they were still given 45 minutes to write an essay, but now had to provide a “polished draft” in which they would be graded on punctuation, spelling, sentence structure, significant supporting details, and other English language writing conventions. In addition, the scoring would go from one scorer to two scorers, with the score averaged for fairness, apparently. So, 3.5 scores could be a likely outcome (and thus failing a student). Little information was given by the Board, and what was provided by the State was released on their website. Professional development for teachers was minimal, and provided by Pearson—the testing company.
Wow! Can anyone else see a problem here? No more time, no provisions for students with learning disabilities to not have to worry about spelling, no exceptions for refugee students from Haiti, and no more than 6 months for teachers to learn about, understand, learn how to teach, and get children ready to write a better product. What could go wrong?
To top it all off, the writing prompt for 4th grade was about riding a camel.
"Suppose you or someone else had a chance to ride a camel. Imagine what happens on this camel ride. Write a story about what happens on this camel ride."
Never mind that many kids from different backgrounds might have trouble with that one, or that some kids from diverse backgrounds might not even know what a camel is, but kids who struggle to write in the first place having to write about something they have never even remotely experienced in 45 minutes and completing a “polished” essay creates an untenable situation. I could go on about how their time would be better spent going to natural history museums where they could see camels, or do units on life in desert climates, or read stories about camels, but I digress.
Republicans nationally, and in Florida specifically, want to dismantle public education, give public dollar vouchers to send kids to private schools, fund charter schools (to devastating consequences, such as the Church of Scientology charter school in Dunedin, Florida that went bankrupt and support “parent trigger” laws that allow parents with kids in F schools to sign a petition that would convert the school to a charter school and/or fire the staff and faculty of the school. They also stand to benefit with the profits that are earned in educational testing, and the promotion of for-profit charter schools. Diane Ravitch, a former undersecretary of Education for George W. Bush who jumped ship, has written about this powerfully:
Gov. Rick Scott seems determined to ruin public education in Florida. Not only is he devastating school budgets with multiple-billion-dollar cuts, but he is intent on crushing the morale of the state's teachers. One can't expect to improve the public schools while demeaning the professionals who work in them.
Scott approaches school reform as if public education were a government scam that needs to be privatized and as if teachers are lazy scoundrels who need a swift kick in the pants or the promise of a bonus to motivate them. He has a naive belief in the value of test scores that is not shared by the nation's testing experts. So he is promoting the proliferation of privately managed charter schools to compete with neighborhood public schools, more testing of all subjects, and at the same time, tying teachers' compensation and evaluations to their students' test scores.
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Merit pay, another of the governor's favorite ideas, is one of those incentive schemes that sounds good but never works. The most rigorous evaluation of merit pay was published last fall by Vanderbilt University, which found that a possible bonus of $15,000 for higher test scores produced no results. The teachers who were not eligible for the bonus got the same test scores as those who were eligible.
Worse than being ineffective, merit pay damages the culture of the school by destroying teamwork and collaboration. Teachers in successful school agree that the fundamental elements of school improvement are trust and collaboration, not competition for monetary rewards.
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Another important study was produced by the National Center on Education and the Economy, which compared our school reform strategies to those in the world's highest performing nations. Unlike us, none of them tests every student every year. None of them ties teacher evaluations and compensation to student test scores. They placed their bets on recruiting, developing and supporting the best possible corps of teachers. They became the best by treating teachers with the dignity and respect that professionalism deserves.
It is also worth noting that no other nation relies as much as we do on standardized multiple-choice tests. Such tests are not scientific instruments, finely calibrated to measure achievement. They are written by humans, and they are prone to error. Some questions have more than one right answer. Students who think differently will be marked wrong for doing so. The very nature of the test teaches children that there must be one right answer to every question, instead of teaching them to ask better questions and seek alternative solutions to difficult problems.
Count me in as a frustrated parent, angry tax payer, and disgusted educator (nearing completion of her PhD in Ed Leadership). With kids in the public school system, I worry about what they are not learning and how unprepared they will be. I can help compensate for the loss, but the focus on testing is a stressor for kids as well as teachers. I’m angry at the taxpayer money going to Pearson, I’m disgusted with the lack of scientific reliability and validity these tests have, not to mention the way many kids are set up for failure. I’m frustrated as a parent because my kids – neither of which were in FCAT writes grades this year but will be next year – aren’t learning critical thinking or having exploratory experiences that expand their minds as much as they could. I’m ready for change. I’m ready to boycott the tests but worry about the impact on my kids. I’m ready for the President to change his tack on education, but know that it will not happen.
Just one frustrated mom, taxpayer, educator, Floridian, Democrat, and citizen.
UPDATED: Just a few things I forgot to add. First, this diary by winterpark gives the human side to this story. Maybe tomorrow I'll add my son's story to the mix.
Second, in all the reading I did today, I came across a message board post where folks were talking about how weird it was that they had friends in other states that had the camel prompt, too. Seems like Pearson is get paid millions upon millions to recycle tests.
Third, there is no indication that the board is going to change their minds or do anything other than dig in and keep going with the higher standards students must meet in 45 minutes. We need to make some noise. Drop the test, give them more time, or make it a rough draft.