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Blog: FCAR
Speakout
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Floridians don’t need Governor
Bush’s hired academics to identify the true long-term impact of his A+ plan for
education. The destruction of public school curricula, school dropout rates that
lead the nation, disillusioned teachers, and endless FCAT drill and practice are
all too familiar to Florida’s students and parents.
Perhaps Jeb thought he could fool
Floridians by hiring academics dressed as fancy-skirted cheerleaders from the
Hoover Institution centered in California and the Manhattan Institute centered
in New York to praise his big-money conservative agenda for education. It seems
that he forgot to check the birth dates on the driver licenses files in
Tallahassee, or didn’t notice that we weren’t born yesterday.
The nearly 300-page report by the
Koret Task Force of the Hoover Institution purports to evaluate the results of
Bush’s eight year effort to change education in Florida. The report continues
the Institution’s documented efforts to influence public policy in the
conservative direction desired by wealthy individuals and corporations. The
report distorts the real meaning presented in student achievement data.
The two shorter reports produced by
members of the Manhattan Institute claim to evaluate the impact of mandated
grade three retention, or forcing students to repeat third grade two or three
times due to low FCAT scores. The authors of those reports also followed the
mandates of their conservative fiscal supporters by misinterpreting the results
of their data analysis. Perhaps it was no accident that the reports were made
public at the start of a two-month discussion of the future direction of
education for Florida’s youth.
Robert R. Lange, Ph.D.
Retired Professor of Educational Research,
Data Analysis, and Measurement
490 Cardinal Oaks Ct.
Lake Mary, FL
407-322-6234
qida@bellsouth.net
posted September 17, 2006
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