The great learning disabilities debate continues...
Those nasty old Florida tests, the FCATs, might be holding back learning-disabled students from graduation. The actor Tom Cruise is mystifyingly held up as an example of learning-disabled person; the mystifying part is because Tom happens to be very profitably ensconced in a field that doesn't require a high school diploma. The more cynical among us might suggest that the learning-disabled kids should aspire to Tom's position, drop out of high school, and make their way to Hollywood.
But I'm not that cynical. Not yet, anyway. A charter school in Florida that specializes in learning-disabled students is worried about the FCAT's, because only eight of their 25 seniors have passed both the math and reading portions of the FCAT's 10th-grade level.
Educators anticipate lawsuits challenging the high- stakes test from some who fail the FCAT but meet all other graduation requirements. Students with learning disabilities are a particular concern because they also are protected by federal legislation.
How far Florida should go in accommodating students with learning disabilities on the FCAT is being debated by a governor's task force that met last week in Tampa. Task force members cite plenty of accommodations already, from Braille or large- print tests to extra time and proctors reading math questions.
Remember when I said, two posts ago, that I wouldn't want to work on a high school exit exam because nobody knows just what we're supposed to be measuring with them? This is a great example. The theory seems to be that the high school exit exams measure the minimal requirements that absolutely every student should master in order to graduate. But no one can agree on what the minimum should be, and it doesn't seem likely that everyone can agree on one standard test for graduation. Some worry that allowing accommodations will continue the "devaluation" of high school diplomas, but it seems to me that the diploma has been pretty devalued already, in the sense that it is no longer is a standard measure of what students know or whether they can take in information without special accommodation.
My theory is that those who are staunchly defending the FCAT are doing so because they feel that high school courses have been dumbed down or "multiculturalized" beyond all recognition, and so the test is seemingly the only way to insure some kind of proof of standardized educational achievement for high school graduates. But with the apparent growth industry of disabilities and accommodations, students who can't read as well as other students are going to claim that they should be tested in a different way. I agree that it's inconsistent to give students accommodations in class and not on the test, which is why Florida finds itself in the situation of having students who fulfill every requirement for graduation except for a passing FCAT score. But I also sympathize with those who don't want to grant test accommodations (unlike some of the test critics mentioned in the article, I don't consider the word "Republican" to be an epithet).
I don't have an answer for this thorny dilemma, and neither, it seems, does anyone else.