Gov Scott to rank school districts today

From the Orlando Sentinel's School Zone

by Leslie Postal

The state is expected to release new, school district rankings tomorrow morning. These are to be based on FCAT scores, it seems.

The Florida Department of Education released a brief media advisory Friday evening , saying the rankings would be discussed at 10 a.m. Monday. It provided no information on the hows or whys, though one Central Florida administrator said the rankings were to be FCAT derived.

The Miami Herald reported later that the planned rankings were coming at the behest of Gov. Rick Scott — and had already upset some educators, who argue a simplistic list based on test scores fails to take into account the well-documented impact that economic and demographic factors have on student performance.

Under the new ranking, St. Johns County schools are apparently #1, according to the St. Augustine Record, which reported that a School Board member there was already sending out celebratory emails after getting early word.

The St. Johns County school district also has the lowest percentage of poor children of any district in Florida. Twenty two percent of its kids are poor, compared to 56 percent for the state average and a high of nearly 82 percent in Gadsden County in the Panhandle, FL DOE data shows.

On most every standardized test, children living in poverty do worse, on average, than those living in wealthier homes. Children still learning English struggle, too. The Florida Association of District School Superintendents made that “impact of poverty” point in an email it sent out Saturday about the coming rankings.

Scott, in a FORTUNE magazine article published earlier this month, mentioned that he wanted to rank all of Florida’s public schools (not districts but schools).

The article’s author, Tory Newmyer, wrote, “The concept of imposing new metrics is pure Scott and dates, he is explaining, to his Columbia/HCA days, when he would rank, say, emergency rooms, to distill what separated the best from the worst. “Really, if you think about some of this stuff, it’s pretty simplistic,” he says.”

The ability to rank schools or districts based on average scores on particular FCAT exams has been available to anyone trolling the DOE website. School districts, Seminole and Brevard among them, have long bragged about their good state showings on particular exams. And the state does already grade districts A-to-F.

But a list of 1-to-67, meant to separate the “best from the worst” would be something new, for sure.

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_education_edblog/2012/01/gov-scott-plans-to-rank-school-districts-by-fcat-scores-it-seems.html