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Hernando Today

Cooking the books no remedy to FCAT failures

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 25, 2009

I was disappointed, but not surprised, to read in the June 21 edition of Hernando Today that the state is going to "realign" the FCAT to produce better results for the high schools.

Whenever the failure of the education establishment becomes known, the first impulse is to cook the books. The same thing happened a few years ago when the SATs were "renormed" so that one could get a "perfect" score of 1600 without answering all questions correctly.

The county and the state are experiencing a phenomenon that's been observed and documented across the country. To wit, public school student performance decreases as students move through the system; the longer they're in the system, the worse they do on standardized tests.

The possible reasons for this range from raging hormones to lack of discipline and classroom disruptions, but no one is well served when we jigger tests to hide the obvious.

Instead, what the state and county educrats should do is admit that the problem does not lie in the test, but in the education process. One could begin by examining the READ 180 program, which "is aimed at struggling readers, from fourth-graders to seniors in high school" and asking how the heck a struggling reader can even make it to the 12th grade. Social promotion? Benign neglect? Is there no academic rigor at all?

The questions are many, but the answers do not lie in killing the messenger (the FCAT) delivering the bad news.

John S.V. Weiss

Spring Hill

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