Florida school grades misrepresent achievement of students, teachers

Posted on 06/30/2011 @ 10:46 AM

Tags: Central

By Ned Schuster

Ned Schuster of Port St. Lucie, who owns a photo company, serves on various committees, including a regional steering committee for the Children's Movement of Florida.

With yet another school year in the books it is again time for parents of school-age children to reflect on the progress our youngsters have made during the academic year.

Many students and parents will be getting their child's FCAT scores. Teachers, school and district officials eagerly anticipate Florida's annual grading of our schools. And these FCAT scores weigh heavily on school grades.

Education officials point out that the FCAT assessments are high-stakes tests. Schools that have sustained high student performance or schools that demonstrate substantial improvement in student performance are rewarded with large sums of "School Recognition" funds — $119.8 million in 2010 alone. Schools that do not do well (the ones that need that extra funding to bring up student achievement) are not provided any additional funding. These "lower-performing" schools are thus punished by officials in Tallahassee.

The FCAT, and in turn the school grade derived from it, is an unequal tool for the measurement of true student performance, especially at the middle and elementary grade levels. Take for example that a kindergarten-through- eighth-grade school tests only 66 percent of its student population and elementary schools test only half of their student populations. This is because FCAT is not administered until the student has reached the third grade.

As the parent of a child who has just finished the second grade in St. Lucie County, I am left wondering why my child's performance is not taken into account in determining his schools grade.

Students in kindergarten through second grade take the FAIR test, which measures the student's Probability of Reading Success by grade 3, and the Stafford (SAT-10) test, which measures the students' performance against the national average.

On the FAIR test my child started the school year with a 20 percent Probability of Reading Success and was able to correctly spell 1 percent of the words he was tested on. This was a huge cause of concern for me and his school. However, by the end of the year his Probability of Reading Success shot up to almost 70 percent, his reading comprehension measured 99 percent and his spelling skyrocketed to 74 percent.

His SAT-10 math results placed him in the top 20 percent of all second-graders nationwide, 18 percent higher than the national average, and he scored a perfect 100 percent on his math problem-solving representation — 21 points above the national average.

Sadly, these incredible gains have no bearing on his school's grade. His school will not receive any of the state's school recognition funds for his substantial gains and the extraordinary efforts of his teachers, school administrators and school support personal. Elementary and K-8 schools are deprived millions of dollars for the gains made by their students.

These early elementary tests measure student progress throughout the school year and are much more of a comprehensive indicator of a student's performance. FAIR for example is given three times per year while FCAT is given only at the end of the school year.

Accountability, financial reward and punitive punishments cannot be measured with the FCAT — a single test given on a single day, without taking into account where the student was at academically at the beginning of the year.

And this is a true disservice to parents, teachers and individuals looking to relocate to Florida and the Treasure Coast.

How can parents accurately measure our children's school based on a method of evaluation that takes into account only a select portion of student population at elementary and K-8 schools?

We can't!

Read the article in the TCPalm here.