August 17, 2003
OFFaL in, more garbage out.
Our Fearless Florida Leader (OFFaL, not to be confused with his brother OFaL) is teaming up with a Texas based Repulican-run non-profit to re-digest and re-regurgitate the same data (from the FLDOE website, titled GOVERNOR JEB BUSH ANNOUNCES BIGGEST IMPROVEMENT EVER ON FCAT) that the state is already manipulating to show that OFFaL’s education agenda is a good thing. The SP Times and the Tribune both ran the same wire service article:
"I love it," Bush said. "They're a little bit different twist on our grading system, but it's very similar."
Critics say Just for The Kids puts too much emphasis on test scores and makes superficial recommendations that vary little from state to state.
"If all you're really doing is mixing some numbers in a computer and saying poor kids do worse, we all know that," said Al Kauffman, who teaches at Harvard Law School and led legal challenges against school testing in Texas. "It's important to look at demographics, but I don't think a greater emphasis on test scores is a way to do it."
Maybe OFFaL is getting a little nervous, with reports like this, from the Miami Herald, popping up frequently lately:
Nearly 90 percent of Florida's public schools failed to meet reading and math standards this year under the new federal No Child Left Behind law, The Herald learned Thursday.
There are no direct consequences to the failures, but they are a stinging rebuke to a system that Gov. Jeb Bush's A Plan for Education has painted as steadily improving.
'What purpose does it serve to call a school an `A' if it's not making adequate progress?'' asked Sam Yarger, dean of the University of Miami School of Education.
State education officials are scheduled to release the results today in Tallahassee, but sources familiar with the data said only 13 percent of the state's schools demonstrated ''adequate yearly progress,'' federal lingo for meeting No Child Left Behind standards.
The Federal analysis seeks to measure progress of poor and minority students. I’m not up on the details, but I think that the state does not really care if minorities do well on the FCAT. That seems to be the big difference between the Fed numbers and the state’s.
By bringing in another entity to crunch the same numbers. OFFaL can dismiss the Fed numbers as an aberration, or a product of the “bureaucracy,” as his brother did with EPA global warming data.
Look for Newspeak obfuscation to continue to emanate from both Bush houses.
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