FCAT (Florida’s Conspiracy Against Teachers) (and children)

I received this today and must share it…

Date: May 21, 2008 3:46:55 AM EDT

Subject: 3rd Grade FCAT Scores Today

The day of the 2008 release of the third-grader’s Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) scores is a good time to step back and take stock of what has simply come to be known as the test in the Sunshine State.

Looking back, the FCAT appeared in the public schools for the first time in the final year of Governor Lawton Chiles’ term in office. But Jeb Bush is married to the FCAT in the minds of most Floridians. And he seems to embrace that idea. Bush often cites the test as the cornerstone of his legacy as the self-proclaimed “education governor” and he did raise the FCAT stakes to point that it now hangs over the state’s public school landscape like a dense fog.

The now former Governor Jeb Bush is the scion of a dynastic American family of incomparable political power and great wealth. The Bush family boasts two President’s of the United States! The family enjoys a huge fortune based on its dealings across the financial spectrum from the Rockefellers to the Saudi royal family. There can be no argument, an extremely powerful man made the FCAT his baby and guided the State of Florida to this system of public school accountability.

For those unfamiliar with the FCAT, it makes children accountable for tested reading skills when they reach the age of eight or 9-years-old. If a child fails to meet the test standards—that child is severely punished. The child is publically humiliated! The child is forced to repeat the third grade while classmates move ahead to the forth grade. The architects of the FCAT believe that holding these children up to shame and ridicule will become an incentive to master the tested reading skills and there is little doubt the approach does increase the pressure on the little ones. There are widespread reports of children becoming physically sick on test days—throwing up on the test, urinating on themselves.

Several years now of administering the test indicate that children living in poverty feel the lion’s share of the FCAT ‘s punitive force. Because a disproportionate number of poor children are African-American and Hispanic and recent immigrants, something the educational bureaucracy calls “the achievement gap” is now all the rage. However, those bureaucrats are adamant that poverty will not be used as an excuse. The children must be punished, they must be held accountable! It is worth noting here that Florida’s white children living in poverty, in rural Jefferson County for instance, do not fare well with the FCAT either.

For a while, a couple of years ago, South Florida had a precious little FCAT success story named Sherdavia Jenkins. She came from the heart of Miami-Dade’s Liberty City and gave the test a whoppin’ worthy of Muhammad Ali in his prime. Ali was someone, by the way, who would have had great difficulty with the FCAT as a child but he did ultimately lecture at Harvard University several times as a grown man and recorded some success in life. Anyway, Sherdavia earned the best FCAT score at Lillie C. Evans Elementary. The justifiable pride Sherdavia must have felt lasted just a few weeks before the violence endemic in her depressed neighborhood claimed her life. She was shot and killed outside her home.

The whole tragedy raises certain questions. Who was ready to step up and be accountable for the all too brief life and violent death of the FCAT whiz? Should Sherdavia have packed up and gotten out of Liberty City? Maybe, but it’s hard out there for a nine-year-old on your own. FCAT supporters often mention the importance of parental accountability. And we may have to settle for blaming Sherdavia’s mother and father for allowing her onto the front porch to play with her dolls. Because not one of Florida’s most powerful and influential public figures even acknowledged that Sherdavia Jenkins’ death was a problem that needed their attention.

Although the level of public school funding and graduation rates in Florida rest at or near the bottom of the national barrel, another layer of FCAT accountability lands on youngsters if they survive into and through high school. This year 26,997 high school seniors who dutifully completed their coursework, did their community service, and fought off all the negative influences toward dropping out will be punished for the sake of FCAT skills. At their upcoming graduation ceremonies, some of these students will pretend to their classmates to be receiving a diploma. But they will walk across that stage to be lashed by their FCAT masters and handed a worthless piece of paper.

At the conclusion of the movie Spiderman, Peter Parker comes to terms with his superhero status and he remembers his uncle saying, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” The creators and the administrators of the FCAT live by another rule. For them it seems to come down to, “With great power, comes great impunity.” Under the FCAT regimen, all the accountability is heaped on the shoulders of children living in deprivation and adults living in comfort accept none.

Jeb Bush had the means to keep his own children in private schools and he always did. The private schools are a haven from incessant testing because parents like Jeb and Columba Bush want their children truly educated and prepared for the future. Yet Gov. Bush, as a matter of public policy, always held that the FCAT was good for the public schools. And to prove it Bush used his power to retain tens of thousands of children in the third grade, he withheld high school diplomas from thousands more, he used the test to stigmatize the schools that serve children living in poverty as failing schools.

But while he was governor, Jeb Bush never ever held himself accountable for anything. In 2002, the state’s short-term investment and pension funds lost $334 million as Enron collapsed, three times the loss of any other fund in the nation. Jeb Bush invested Florida in Edison charter schools when the stock was valued at $37 and got out when it was worth 14 cents. Another $500 million of the public’s money was lost to enable his other corporate adventures.

Former Gov. Bush still doesn’t believe in accountability except for public school children. It has been reported that after leaving office Bush got a new job with Lehman Brothers. The Wall Street investment banking firm paid him over $400,000 to take a seat on their board of directors. Shortly thereafter, Florida’s Local Government Investment Pool and the Florida Retirement System purchased $842 million in bad investments from Lehman Brothers.

At ceremonies as Rep. Marco Rubio was ascending to Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Jeb Bush gave Rubio a sword. The gift was a sign that Rubio was pledged to defend the Bush legacy, including the FCAT. And Speaker Rubio has been faithful to his mentor’s charge, seeing to it that the burdens of accountability remain squarely and exclusively on children and off powerful men like him. A recent news report has Speaker Rubio’s Miami-Dade home inexplicably increasing in value a month after he bought it. Another story describes a home equity loan to Rubio from a bank run by politically connected allies. Then Rubio was accused of slipping language into legislation that allowed Max Alvarez, who describes Rubio as “like a son”, to keep a multi-million dollar turnpike fuel contract.

Even with Marco Rubio presiding in the House, the Florida Legislature did make changes to the FCAT. Sadly these changes turned out to be among the most cravenly self-serving “FCAT reforms” imaginable. This powerful governing body left untouched all the FCAT punishments for children after gutting public school funding by $2.3 billion. They went on to reduce the weight given to FCAT test scores when grading the schools, likely raising grades that have reflected badly on Legislators and the Florida Department of Education. It has all become almost impossible to fathom.

Paul A. Moore