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Give FCAT an F and kick it out of school

Subhead:
It's a totally useless test that means nothing and tells you even less.

Someone should give this Mom Juanita Doyon's address: Parent Empowerment Network, an organization that includes Mothers Against WASL.

By Nicole Brochu

The fact that the FCAT has lasted this long, given its utter uselessness in real-world applications, is what galls me the most, both as a parent and a taxpayer.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not afraid of the test, or any guidepost by which to measure our educational standards. I think we need achievement assessments. I just think the FCAT is a poor excuse for a standard, and it's a detriment to boot. Put it this way: My third-grader scored high on the reading and math assessments, but you won't catch me blaring that news on my Facebook page, or calling the parents to brag about their smart granddaughter. Because those FCAT scores don't tell you much about how smart or learned my child is. All they tell you is that she learned to take a test – a lesson hammered into students all year, at the expense of just about everything else – and that she's ready to move on to the next grade.

Whoopee. Sorry, but I expected no less. My parent-teacher conferences and my involvement in her day-to-day education told me that already, and in much more effective detail, and flagged any struggles she may have been having when I needed to know that – at the beginning and throughout the year, not at the end, when it's too late.

You also won't catch any high-schooler in their right minds putting their FCAT scores on their college application "achievement" lists. If they do, you know they don't have much of an achievement list to speak of. That's because colleges could not care less what an applicant's FCAT score is. Wanna know why? Because it doesn't mean anything and measures even less!

It seems everyone else is in on the dirty little secret, except Florida's stubborn and stubbornly clueless state education officials.

Even worse, if that's possible, the state spends millions of our precious and limited education dollars on a test that doesn't count for a hill of beans outside Florida, and doesn't count for much more in it. Why make schools' grades so reliant on such meaningless numbers? Why put students and teachers and schools through such fits getting ready for it and worrying about grades that don't matter to anyone else? Why, especially, suspend all extracurricular activities – for every grade, whether they're taking the test or not -- throughout the month or so the FCAT is being given?

The biggest question, though, is: Why the heck do we still have the FCAT anyway?

There is no good reason. Don't tweak it, don't reform it, don't even overhaul it. Just get rid of the dumb thing and find a standardized assessment we can all believe in – and colleges find credible.


— Nicole Brochu
South Florida Sun-Sentine
2009-06-10
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/todaysbuzz/wednesday/sfl-0610-buzz-brochu-fcat-testing,0,1421159.story

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