Will the state listen to the people about the FCAT?

From the Gainsville Sun's editorial board

The Alachua County School Board isn't alone in calling for a retreat from Florida's increasingly brutal high-stakes testing regime.

On Tuesday, the same day our School Board approved what amounts to an anti-FCAT resolution, the Osceola County School Board also voted to ask Tallahassee "to reexamine public school accountability systems..." Other school boards around the state have already approved similar resolutions and more will surely follow suit.

"We want to encourage the state of Florida, the governor and the state Board of Education to come up with a different type of accountability standard," Alachua County School Board Chair April Griffin said this week. "Basing everything on one day in a child's year is not the correct way, we believe."

What should be Tallahassee's response? Ignore the school districts and continue to require ever-tougher and ever more frequent testing? Give in and back away from using tests to determine not only student achievement but school funding?

Here's a suggestion for Gov. Rick Scott: Why not use the growing disenchantment with the FCAT to initiate a new era of state-district collaboration.

The problem all along has been that the state's mandatory testing regime is a top-down process; a mandate imposed by the Legislature and passed on by the DOE with little or no input from the district level.

Scott's response to the school districts — his challenge, really — ought to go something like this:

You don't like the FCAT? Fine. What's your Plan B?

What alternative tests, measurements and standards should the state adopt that would accurately assess student academic progress and fairly hold schools accountable for doing what they are supposed to do; educate Florida's children?

We imagine that the professional educators and administrators at the district level would embrace such a challenge. For his part, if he can be persuaded that there is a better way to measure student performance and school accountability, Scott ought to be prepared to take such a "Plan B" to the Legislature this year for consideration.

That's called collaboration, and it is exactly the opposite approach from the top-down dictatorial process that gave Florida the FCAT.

http://www.gainesville.com/article/20120607/OPINION01/120609734?p=2&tc=pg