BlogWood: MT Archives

The test that ate Florida

PB Post

The FCAT has eaten some of Florida's schoolchildren.

At 159 schools in 30 counties, a suspiciously large number of students disappeared just before the FCAT was administered in February and March. The students unaccountably "transferred" to -- who knows where? Florida's Department of Education is looking into the mass migration because the kids might have gotten "lost" so that their FCAT scores wouldn't drag down FCAT-based school grades.

Ten schools in Palm Beach County and one in Martin are on the list of schools with mysterious vanishings. "We're not just looking into transfers," said Education Department spokeswoman Frances Marine. "Playing with the numbers is not something that we will stand for. We're looking at any way the school districts tried to circumvent accountability."

But what about the ways the Education Department itself circumvents accountability? For example, as The Post reported June 17, the state changed the rules so that 191 schools statewide -- 21 of them in Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties -- could get A's instead of B's this election year.

What was the change? Like most of the plethora of factors governing school grades -- including the break that lets schools discount "transfer" students -- it is likely to induce head-scratching. For schools to get an A, lower-scoring students had to progress year-to-year at roughly the same rate as higher-scoring students. This year, though, the higher-scoring students can leave the lower-scoring students behind at a faster clip. Clear? The state has made similarly arcane changes every year, making any claims of "accountability" laughable.
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One devious possibility is that the Bushes intentionally are creating punitive bureaucracies to drive people away from public schools. Even in the face of repeated voucher-school scandals, Jeb's beloved private voucher schools have not been saddled with the bureaucratic requirements -- such as the FCAT and school grades -- imposed on public schools.