What's the best way to skin the
FCAT?
By Marion Brady
*October 16, 2005
There's more than one way to skin a cat.
And if that "cat" is the FCAT (the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test), and
you're a school principal whose reputation and professional advancement hinge on
your school's scores, the best way to skin it is a major concern.
No principal is ever going to admit actually doing it, but most know a workable,
score-improving strategy. Call it "D & C" -- Divide and Conquer.
It's pretty simple. You know that a certain percentage of your students are
going to do OK on the test, and you can tell from their home addresses who most
of them are. You also know that a certain percentage are going to flunk and,
again, can tell from their home addresses who most of them are.
So you know you can pretty much ignore those two groups -- know your school's
fate depends primarily on the performance of the marginal students in between.
It makes sense, then (insofar as you can manage it) to concentrate your best
test-related efforts where they'll have the most impact on your school's scores.
Don't say it doesn't happen. It happens.
These kinds of stories irritate politicians and policymakers in Tallahassee, so
drawing attention away from them calls for diversionary tactics.
The recent release of part of an old 10th grade FCAT is such a tactic. If the
media and the public can be made to focus narrowly on the questions from one
specific, carefully selected test, they won't be talking or writing about the
whole slew of problems which high-stakes testing either ignores or makes worse.
Let's review just a few of those many problems:
Fear -- student, teacher, administrator fear -- is the foundation upon which the
present high-stakes-testing education-reform effort is built. Fear never has
been, isn't now, and never will be a sound basis for educating, any more than
it's a sound basis for marriage, community, religion, or anything else involving
human relationships.
A brand-new, 25-state study by researchers at Arizona State University and the
University of Texas says there's no consistent link between pressures to score
high on high-stakes tests and student performance on the best available measure
of learning, the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Dumping a third of the young out on the street without a plan or program (as
testing is now doing) will have far more expensive and painful long-term
consequences for America than did ignoring New Orleans' levees.
Our obsession with standardized testing is sidetracking and downgrading the
traits and abilities that are every society's salvation -- creativity,
ingenuity, leadership, character, individuality, love of learning. And we're
doing this to ourselves even though there's no evidence of a connection between
high-stakes test scores and adult success.
Because, done right, the work is tough and the pay is lousy, the teaching
profession is already on the ropes. Now, it's being further de-professionalized
by substituting forced, mindless test-drill drudgery for a rich, varied,
intellectually stimulating curriculum.
FCAT defenders argue that the Sunshine State Standards legitimize the test. What
nobody is pointing out is that those so-called standards were put in place
entirely by those with a vested interest in perpetuating them.
As long as officials in Tallahassee can raise or lower the line between failure
and success simply by changing mathematical formulas, education reform will
continue to be a game played for political advantage rather than educational
excellence.
It's the poverty, stupid! Teachers can't surmount in a few hours a day a list as
long as your arm of poverty-related obstacles to learning.
To more make sense of education policy, follow the money.
State officials have borrowed a page from magicians, pickpockets and scam
artists: Divert the victim's attention. As long as dribbling out old FCAT
questions is front-page news, the really important questions about what
"standards and accountability" is doing to kids and to America's prospects for
the future are unlikely to get asked.
Even those who take the diversion bait and focus single-mindedly on the FCAT
itself are marginalized. John Winn, Florida's Commissioner of Education,
accomplished that when he accompanied release of the sample test with the
comment that what worried him were "arm-chair psychometricians."
So, even if by some remote chance you have a beef about a test question, if you
don't want to go public with your ignorance or naivete, keep it to yourself.
*Originally published in the Orlando Sentinel. Published here by
permission of the author.
