FCAT headed in wrong direction

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FCAT headed in wrong direction

Opinions

Friday, 15 June 2012 11:48

Jay Wheeler
School Board

There is an organization in Central Florida called the Central Florida Public School Boards Coalition.
This coalition meets monthly in Orlando and its membership is comprised of the following school districts; Manatee, Hillsborough, Polk, Osceola, Orange, Seminole, Lake, Marion, Volusia, and Brevard counties. Attendee’s are usually elected school board members, and senior district leadership. Typically there are five or more superintendents present at these meetings. I am currently the vice-chairman of the coalition, and will be chairman next year.

The coalition has set up a task force to look at FCAT and accountability reform. FCAT stands for Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. The FCAT was first administered in 1998. Prior to the FCAT the state did not have any formal statewide assessment. This accountability task force was lead by me and Orange County School Board member Rick Roach, and board members from Lake, Brevard, and Citrus County school boards also participated on this task force.
The FCAT has been used to determine if a student is performing at, above, or below grade level in reading & math. Scoring is on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest score. A 3 is considered performing at grade level. These scores are used to retain students, and to hand out school letter grades similar to student grades with A being the highest grade and F being the lowest grade. Up until this past year the FCAT was a reasonably good metric, and really helped Florida K-12 public education make gains to get us competitive with other state public education systems. Under Gov. Rick Scott the FCAT is now headed in the wrong direction, and is no longer helping students.
My role on this task force was to “follow the money”, and public education is BIG BUSINESS! The state of Florida has contracted with one firm to do all K-12 FCAT testing; actually the FCAT is only given in grades 3-10. Pearson Education has the sole source contract with the state of Florida Department of Education for FCAT. Not including the 2011-12 school year, over the previous three school years the state of Florida has paid $132 million to Pearson. Bear in mind that if a school district does poorly on the FCAT they have to purchase the support material/software for remediation from Pearson. In the 2010-11 school year Osceola Schools spent $267,000, and Orange County School District spent $1.6 million with Pearson for these materials. Florida has 67 public school districts.
The potential solutions are as follows. One option is to break up the Pearson monopoly and give testing to three firms broken down by elementary, middle, and high school. Another option is to engage universities that have a college of education within them and have graduate students involved with developing standards and tests that aren’t in it for profit. The argument has been that Universities are not set up for this; I would argue that given over 100 million dollars, they surely could get geared up for this.
For better or worse the most reliable tests are still the SAT and ACT given in high school for college admission. While not all colleges use these tests for admission, most still do. Hopefully the state of Florida’s department of Education will become re-engaged in doing their job. I doubt this will happen under our current governor any time soon. Plus if they read this, they will put their spin machine in motion to refute this. Meanwhile he’s been governor since 2010 and I’ve been a school board member since 2002. Insofar as K-12 public education in Florida is concerned he still has a lot to learn, we can only hope that he really wants to.
Jay Wheeler is the district 1 Osceola County School Board member.