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Florida Department of Sludge
The bill that would allow learning-disabled students who could not pass the FCAT to graduate is a good start, but it has a long way to go when it comes to helping struggling third-graders.
One of the truisms of Tallahassee is that when everyone supporting a bill refers to it as a good start, it means that most of them are sorely disappointed. This was clearly the case as the House Education Committee unanimously approved legislation to blunt one of the cruelest edges of the FCAT.
The bill would entitle learning-disabled students to receive the standard diploma -- a prerequisite for college admission and the military -- despite failure to pass the 10th grade FCAT. The school-based committee that supervises each disabled student's Individual Education Plan could waive the FCAT if all other graduation requirements are met.
This is progress, no doubt about it, particularly because it takes the waiver decision out of the heavy hands of the Florida Department of Education, which discourages applications and grants very few. A private educator who works with dyslexic students described the process as "a bunch of bureaucratic sludge that many parents do not know how to wade through."
Without this legislation, hundreds if not thousands of bright seniors would be barred from college next year because of vision impairment, dyslexia or other disabilities that keep them from passing the reading portion of the FCAT. In the classroom and for every other test, including the SAT and ACT, they are allowed accommodations such as surrogate readers and talking computers. But the education bureaucrats claim that the "validity" of their sacred FCAT would be compromised by any accommodation to the children's physical disabilities. This offends common sense and fairness, not to mention federal law.
So the bill must become law this session, as everyone promises it will.
But the disabled students would still have to take the FCAT in the 10th grade and again in the 11th without any of the accommodations that are good enough for everything else. That's worse than pointless; it's needlessly cruel. Moreover, nothing is to be done for disabled students in the lower grades. A bright but dyslexic third-grader, for example, would have to be held back this year for failing the FCAT unless her teachers took the trouble of assembling a portfolio that documents her mastery of third-grade work.
Many such children "will never get to the 12th grade," warns Rep. Loranne Ausley, D-Tallahassee, the House member who has led the fight for these children.
In those disappointing regards, the bill falls far short of the reforms recommended by a gubernatorial task force that had urged the widest possible variety of accommodations and alternate assessments. So the bureaucrats win again; they're yielding only as little as they saw that they had to. The pity of it is that the governor could and should have made his department of sludge give up a lot more.
— Editorial
Fighting the Sludge
St. Petersburg Times
March 24, 2003
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/03/24/Opinion/Fighting_the_sludge.shtml
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