The parallel between poverty and FCAT performance.

From the Palm Beach Post's editorial board

If Gov. Rick Scott’s and state Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson’s goal in ranking Florida’s 67 school districts based on their latest FCAT scores was to start a dialogue, they have succeeded mightily.

The problem is, the conversation so far has had little to do with how to improve the state of education in Florida, but rather has focused on how unfair and unscientific the rankings are because they do not take into consideration mitigating factors such as socioeconomics, graduation rates or year-after-year gains.

Marion County ranked No. 44 out of 67 districts on the list that Scott said “allows taxpayers to see their investment in education at work.” Meanwhile, coastal St. Johns County (St. Augustine) was ranked No. 1, while tiny Madison County on the Georgia border was listed as No. 67.

What the Scott-Robinson list did not show is that if those counties were ranked by the number of children who qualify for free and reduced lunches, that is, who are low-income, St. Johns ranks No. 1 in the state with the lowest percentage of such students, Marion County ranks No. 44 and Madison County ranks No. 66, or next to last.

In other words, there appears to be a parallel between poverty and FCAT performance.

“The ranking isn’t going to make that any worse,” Robinson said of the poverty levels, “but what it will do is provide an opportunity for local community leaders to say ‘What can we do as a community?’”

That the commissioner and the governor do not believe Florida’s communities are fully attuned to how well or how poorly their school districts are performing, is an indicator of how out of touch our leaders in Tallahassee are with the average Floridian. Marion Countians know full well how our school system stands, that it is average; and rest assured, virtually every student and parent knows the grade their respective school received this year.

Ironically, Robinson told reporters “stigmatizing isn’t something that this was intended to do,” yet that is exactly what it did to districts like Marion County’s that were on the lower half of the list.

Like many of its critics, we have argued since FCAT’s inception a dozen years ago, that using a single test to measure the quality and improvement of an entire school district is folly, especially when a few bad scores can bring down the grade of an entire school, indeed an entire district.

It is too bad that Scott and Robinson did not take the list and use it as a positive conversation starter. For example, as Scott lobbies to restore $1 billion of the $1.4 billion he and the legislature cut from our public schools last year, it undoubtedly would have been instructive for him to ask school administrators and teachers how they could best use restored funding or, heaven forbid, additional funding, to help students, low-income ones in particular, achieve better FCAT scores.

That would be a dialogue everyone would have loved to join in on.

As it is, we have spirited dialogue, but once again it is not productive discourse, just more grumbling about the stigmatization caused by using FCAT and FCAT alone to measure our schools and our educators. When will our policy-makers in Tallahassee ever learn?

http://www.ocala.com/article/20120124/OPINION/120129811?p=2&tc=pg