The State of Florida blames not helps schools

from the Miami Herald's Editorial Board

Any way you slice and dice the numbers, Florida’s new way of ranking its 67 school districts — based solely on FCAT results, a one-shot test — tells parents and taxpayers absolutely nothing about the quality of their public schools, be they traditional schools or charters.

Gov. Rick Scott and Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson say they aren’t trying to “stigmatize” districts that score near the bottom. Instead, Mr. Robinson says the new way of ranking districts — ignoring such things as poverty levels, the number of students learning English as a second language and year-over-year improvements among minorities — will “provide an opportunity for local community leaders to say ‘What can we do as a community?’”

After a decade of reforms and setting an ever-higher bar for students’ performance (a race to achieve that this editorial board supports), the state’s new measure is a simpleton’s way that ignores today’s complex reality. It does not take into account the size of a district, whether it’s rural, urban or suburban or schools’ progress or lack of it year after year on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. It ignores how many students are taking AP courses and passing, how many of them are minorities or poor and whether there’s improvement.

It’s all based on one score. Ridiculous.

Case in point: the St. Johns school district, which has the fewest number of poor children by population in the state, ranked at the top of the state’s simpleton gauge. By contrast, Miami-Dade’s school district — where seven in 10 students qualify for free or reduced lunch, an urban district with 350,000 students — ranked 37th among 67 districts.

Duh? Really?

The Tampa Bay (formerly St. Petersburg) Times did its own numbers crunching on school districts and discovered quite a different picture of progress. “No big district in Florida has done better in boosting the percentage of students passing the FCAT in reading and math from 2001 to 2010,” the Times reported on Jan. 23. “In reading progress, Miami-Dade ranked No. 2 among all districts, while St. Johns ranked No. 16.”

Why? Because the Times analysis included demographics and progress in student scores, along with a district’s size, in drilling down to capture the more complicated and nuanced picture of progress. That’s as it should be.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/02/05/2623725/floridas-simpleton-rankings.html#storylink=cpy