In Florida, students at failing high schools have the option to be bussed elsewhere - but what happens when all the surrounding high schools don't make the grade, either?
For parents of students at Orange's three failing schools, the F's mean their kids could be bused to better schools -- those rated at least a C. But with four more of Orange's 17 high schools dropping from C to D, the choices are becoming more limited.
A school advisory co-chairman had some strong words about those kids who dared to flee sinking ships:
At Oak Ridge, School Advisory Council co-chairman Cheryl Leonard said her school has been ruined by an exodus of strong students who fled for magnet programs elsewhere in the county.
"Oak Ridge has been absolutely raped of its best students," said the Oak Ridge alum and mother of an incoming senior. "I want to cry when I think about the students who have left either because of magnets or because their parents have lied about their address."
Bet those parents aren't crying. They got their kids out of failing schools and into good ones. Why should they have an obligation to stay behind? The problems in Florida's education system start early, and while the focus has been on elementary school students, the benefits have not yet begun to show for the later grades:
School officials struggled Tuesday to explain what caused the poor showing at many high schools after years of taking standardized tests known as FCATs.
Many students arrive at high school unable to do ninth-grade-level work, state education officials said. The schools inherit students promoted to the next grade even though they never mastered essential skills, said Jim Warford, chancellor of primary and secondary education in Florida.
The WaPo has a long and interesting article on the FCAT, which states that Florida's own improvement programs aren't meshing with NCLB:
In 1998, when Republican Jeb Bush, the president's brother, first ran for governor, 48 percent of Florida's students were dropping out before getting a high school diploma...Jeb Bush made education one of the most prominent issues of his campaign, promising to bring accountability and improvements to a system in which many Floridians had lost faith...
The new education plan, dubbed A+, placed strong emphasis on a new statewide student-testing program. At the same time, then Texas Gov. George W. Bush pushed through a similar program in his state. It laid the foundation for the No Child Left Behind federal education reforms he touted during the 2000 campaign and eventually pushed through Congress.
Those two programs -- one federal and one state -- are on a collision course this summer. That's when new test results could show that many of state's schools pass the Florida A+ standards while failing to show sufficient improvement under the federal No Child Left Behind rules. Failing to make progress on the federal standards would require the state to let the parents of students in failing schools transfer their children to better-performing alternatives.
We're not talking about a slight disconnect here. 94% of Florida's schools passed the Florida standard, while only 13% passed the NCLB standards. How could this be?
The goal of NCLB is to raise reading and math proficiency to 100 percent for all students in the country by 2014. Unlike the A+ plan, which grades schools on the aggregate scores of all their students, NCLB measures the performance of subgroups of students in reading and math and requires all groups -- defined by racial, ethnic, income and other factors -- to keep improving until all groups reach the 100 percent goal. These different scoring techniques have given some schools passing grades under the state A+ plan but failing grades under NCLB.
The article does a nice job of outlining the political pressures that are affecting Florida's educational hurricane. Democrats vs. Republicans, accountability supporters vs. those who feel the FCAT is "biased," testing supporters vs. those who believe tests impeded "deep thinking," etc. It's all there. Just as Florida brought the world's attention to the problems with the voting process, Florida will be ground zero for some of the primary battles being fought over NCLB.
(Thanks to Devoted Reader Roy L. for the link)
Posted by kswygert at June 16, 2004 10:08 AM