Jenny Damon (Edison): FCAT Scores

   The Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) results are due to come out to students this week across the state.  Many families wait nervously as their children’s promotion to the next grade depends on their test results.  Children as young as eight and nine years old feel tremendous amounts of test anxiety, stress, and burn-out as teachers push their own achievement pressures on to their students.  The FCAT was designed in 1971 to assess academic strengths and weaknesses, particularly in the basic skills.  Its manifest function was to implement a workable system of accountability for the public schools.  The students’ results from the FCAT are used to grade individual schools.  There is a direct relationship between financial funding and the school’s grade.  Although since its inception scores have risen,  the latent effects of stress, pressure, and stigma to the schools is becoming more evident.  Early objections to the FCAT have ranged from challenges to administrative procedures (Bradey v. State of Florida, 1979) to objections of stigmatizing entire schools (Debra P. v. Turlington, 1982).  More recent criticism centers on the over-emphasis of FCAT scores, teaching to the test, and funding being directed away from the very schools that need it most.  Although test scores can be diagnostically useful, they should not be used to drive the curriculum.

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