The NY Times wrote about the FCAT today. There are two paragraphs by Michael Winerip that stood out:
Does the test truly measure what the students know:
Last year, Rick Roach, 63, a member of the Orange County School Board in Orlando, attracted national attention when he took the state’s reading competency test, and then admitted to having failed it. Mr. Roach, who has two master’s degrees, believes that the test — which was flunked by about half of high school students — is a poor measure of a child’s reading ability. He has produced a video that features eight students who failed it, reading aloud flawlessly. “They can read,†he said, “they just can’t pass.â€
And a footnote at the end of the article:
This is my last education column. Again. The first time, in the early 1990s, politicians wanted to make our system more like Japan’s. (This was right before the Japanese economic collapse.) A decade later, they devised a system to punish teachers if every child in America wasn’t academically proficient. Now they’re developing a standardized test to evaluate high school band teachers. And through it all, teachers have continued to educate children, and children have continued to learn.
Are we putting too much emphasis on the FCAT? How many in your office or company would pass it? Would the School Board pass it if they were tested?