Someone, in this test-obsessed state, has clearly failed. I don’t think it was the kids.

From the Miami Herald, by By Fred Grimm, fgrimm@MiamiHerald.com

Proficiency under pressure — that’s what we test for. Right? That’s what public education is all about in the new Florida. Standardized tests decide whether students graduate, how much teachers earn, what performance grades schools get, how much bonus money to give to schools that excel.

So much rides on test outcomes that classroom curriculums have been narrowed to a kind of perpetual test preparation. And test taking. The Fort Myers News-Press, looking at the state’s mandatory testing regime, counted 27 standardized tests that eighth-grade students were required to jam into this school year. Students, teachers, principals, administrators, superintendents, even school board members, all know they’re judged by the outcomes of tests.

Yet the state superintendent, the state board of education and NCS Pearson, the giant testing corporation with a four-year, $254 million contract to administer the state’s standardized test regime, seem to suffer no such accountability. Their competence, their proficiency under pressure has been tested this school year. They flunked and flunked spectacularly.

The Florida Board of Education was forced to hold an emergency meeting Tuesday, by telephone, to fix the state’s ill-conceived new standards for the FCAT writing exams — because, after 81 percent of fourth graders passed last year’s writing tests, only 27 percent did as well this year.

The startling failure rate seemed to indicate a massive wave of stupidity has inundated Florida’s public education system. I doubt the problem had to do with a sudden loss of intellect among elementary students. As Education Commission Gerard Robinson admitted Tuesday, “Students didn’t overnight become bad writers.”

The embarrassed state board tried a quick fix, voting to grade the results on a kind of curve, dropping the passing grade, a strategy only conceived to tamp down the failure rate. But more horrible FCAT scores are coming.

“What we saw yesterday , we predicted,” Miami-Dade Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told his school board Wednesday. “We knew [the percentage of failures] would be significant. What we didn’t know was how severe.”

Carvalho described a chaotic series of “recurring and ever changing” teaching standards pouring out of the state over the last year, most of them after the school year was well under way. He counted 18 major changes.

Teachers, whose salaries depend, in part, on FCAT scores, started out the school year expecting to emphasize certain accountability criteria but learned along the way that the state had decided otherwise.

Carvalho, clearly angry, said the state board also decided to include test scores from foreign language students in just their second year of learning English when calculating school grades and teacher evaluations. That amounts to 67,000 kids in his system — no other school district comes close — putting Miami-Dade County schools and its teachers at a mighty competitive disadvantage for state award money and teacher bonuses.

Then the state board ruled that special-education children enrolled in alternative schools would also be tested, except the results will be applied to schools that they normally would have attended, except for their disability. “Schools in which they might have never walked through the door,” Carvalho said. “It’s insane.”

Someone, in this test-obsessed state, has clearly failed. I don’t think it was the kids.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/16/2803049/florida-not-kids-flunked-fcat.html#storylink=cpy