Former Florida education chief John Winn says the FCAT is broken

The Palm Beach Post

Former state Education Commissioner John Winn says Florida's system for assigning high school grades is badly flawed. He's right. He's also one of the main reasons it's so messed up.

As an adviser to Gov. Jeb Bush and then as education commissioner under Mr. Bush, Mr. Winn pushed to make the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test the key component of school grades and the cornerstone of what he and the governor liked to call school accountability. Almost since foisting this travesty on the state in 1999, the FCAT crowd has pointed to rising test scores in lower grades as proof that the system works. For years, we've been pointing out that the gains vanish when students go to high school.

In a 2006 editorial, for example, we said: "It's encouraging if Florida's elementary and middle school students are reading better. But the FCAT numbers show that they aren't making the transition to the more challenging reading skills required by high school." Mr. Winn, who briefly was commissioner this summer during the transition from Eric Smith to Gerard Robinson, now agrees with us. He told the Aug. 18 meeting of the Higher Education Coordinating Council - an advisory panel created by the Legislature - that, "I think we made a huge step backward in terms of college readiness." Too many high schools, he said, get an A or a B grade even though FCAT scores continue to be lousy. If "you make a school look much better than it is," Mr. Winn said, "you can't get community support for making it better."

Mr. Winn is right that the gap between FCAT scores and grades assigned to high schools is a problem. But the solution is not more reliance on the FCAT to assign school grades. Except for science, the test is not even given to students above 10th grade, and they take the test three months before school ends. There is no FCAT for history, foreign languages or the arts.

In any case, Mr. Winn's criticism of school grades is too narrow. He also should have asked why so many middle school students get high FCAT scores - leading to top grades for their schools - yet the schools seem to be churning out students who are not prepared to do well in high school. FCAT results weren't originally intended to grade schools. They were supposed to identify areas where individual students needed improvement. The whole FCAT-based grading system appears to be bogus.

Despite these problems, Gov. Scott and the Legislature have decreed that standardized tests also must be key in determining teacher pay. The mild good news is that more factors, including student scores on the SAT, ACT and career certification tests, are being included in high school grades - though Mr. Winn warns other changes inflate grades. The FCAT itself also is being replaced by end-of-course tests in all subjects.

The new picture of what high school students know, and their level of college preparedness, should be more valid. The results still could be alarming - more proof that the Jeb Bush "reforms" that John Winn carried out are a gimmick.

- Jac Wilder VerSteeg,

for The Palm Beach Post Editorial Board

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/editorials/insider-admits-system-bogus-1815178.html