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Teaching for the sake of FCAT distorts learning
Kudos to a Florida teacher who has the nerve to speak truth to power.
Virginia Harper
There are over 300 secondary reading teachers in Lee. We teach courses called Intensive Reading, Language, Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) English and have for the past No Child Left Behind (NCLB) data-driven decade.
Teacher morale is already at an all time low, and along with a poverty driven local economy (anybody read the research on how poor hungry adolescents can’t stay in school?) Saturday’s editorial in The News-Press (“Schools fail older students,” May 30) is neither a true FCAT snapshot nor enlightening.
Elementary scores have risen. Congratulations on teaching to the test. We’ve known for 30 years that teaching one assessment will show gains. If I set my mind to break an unruly, spirited horse, and that’s all I do, I’ll break the horse into my unthinking servant or make it useless.
The good scores indicate teachers are instructing during formative years — get them early and they matriculate — 100 years of research isn’t wrong again. Language development (see Piaget, Vygotsky noted language development researchers) is fully formed in the average human by 9 years old, possibly sooner. After fifth grade, only language “acquisition” can be improved, still inexorably tied to the mother’s involvement in the child’s life (see Freud, Jung, Rogers). The father’s care, better than no mother, is not as productive as a literate, engaged mother. Where are most mothers (and dads)? Working two or three jobs to keep the family fed.
The FCAT is not the only measure of success: SAT, ACT, CPE and GED, NRT, and Stanford have established precedents. So much beyond a teacher’s control drives poor FCAT scores: no literacy at home, no access to libraries, no English speaker 24/7. I suppose I, and my fellow teachers, could just drill 10th grade FCAT into almost monolingual, but mainstreamed students.
They could just stare nonsensically at the page. I suppose we could just give practice FCATs intermittently to high schoolers who attend one or two days a week because they need jobs to help their families. Or, we could keep piling on work to students with below average IQs who can’t think on the critical level required of a test composed by “specialists” four times removed from the classroom.
Maybe we can take our Intensive Reading courses straight to jail where 80 percent of the inmates, 17-to-33 years old, dropped out, often before high school, and can’t read or had no family support system, 30 percent of whom were former foster care or abused children, and over 60 percent are African American or Hispanic victims of poverty and delayed social language development.
Graduating students who “can’t read” 20 years ago? No, centuries of people who don’t read well. Reading is a practiced skill, not a brain birthright. Get us all a whip, and we can stand over our students circling the room shouting “Read, Read, Read!” and beat them if they fall asleep from test taking fatigue, from having worked late hours, or from mind-numbing behavioral drugs.
Stop gratuitous graduation? Stop Tallahassee’s exceptions to a diploma written into law, not us. The editorial’s unspoken dictum is no diploma. So send them out into the world unable to get any jobs at all?
Parents — want your kids to pass the Sept. 10 FCAT? Get them a free online subscription to the New York Times. Many test passages are lifted word for word from the New York Times or other specialized journals meant for professionals. Articles that are in the public domain, but Tallahassee keeps teachers in the dark — a true paradox.
We do the job as public educators if we get the usual top 50 percent through the first time they take the high school tests. Then we’ve done it again when we get the remaining below mean 40 percent through by 12th grade. The research shows we are doing a great job at all levels.
— Virginia Harper
TheNews-Press
2009-06-03
http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090603/OPINION/90602064&template=printart
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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