Editorial Response to Parental Access
to Graded FCATS
l Gainesville Sun –- “The FCAT sham” -- August 14,
2004
…These days, Team Bush is under increased pressure from parents whose children
failed the FCAT and who want to examine the tests to determine what questions
their children got wrong. Bush officials refuse to accommodate, saying releasing
the questions will make it easier to cheat on the test in the future. But
perhaps there are other reasons Tallahassee wants to so jealously guard the
"integrity" of the FCAT testing process.
"Minnesota lawmakers opened access to testing materials there upon learning that
7,000 students were denied their high school diplomas due to errors made by the
test-grading company, NCS Pearson," reported Florida Today this week. "It is the
same firm that grades the FCAT."
l Daytona Beach News-Journal – “Failed testing:
Making tests public will reveal flaws” – August 18, 2003
Now tests on the test begin with the first days of schools across the land. If
these tests were used for diagnosing students and teaching methods, then all
would be fine. But the game has been to pass the test. Money, evaluations and
promotions rest on passing the tests. And that doesn't count the billions that
can be earned by private companies making or scoring tests or manufacturing
programs to help schools push students to score higher.
The testing game is a sham. And it's time to expose it.
Make the results of the tests public, as a group of Florida parents is
demanding.
Gov. Jeb Bush maintains that the tests can't be made public because they would
then not be able to use the tests again. That dodges the issue. The aim of
testing should not be to preserve the integrity of tests but to ensure that each
child receives an adequate education.
Corporations who make the tests may disagree, too, claiming it would be too
expensive. But their motive is profit. States can lead the way to a solution by
requiring manufacturers to create tests that can be rotated and whose results
can be shown to teachers and parents. That can be done - and has been done -
without compromising tests.
Making the tests public would hold the testing industry accountable. It would
expose the exam's weak points, for instance. Questions that are poorly worded or
otherwise flawed would be known - and presumably have a better chance of being
corrected. Improper scoring also could be discovered faster and corrected.
Making the tests public would enable teachers and parents to understand the test
and provide academic help for children precisely where it is needed. In order to
improve, students need to know what went wrong. Public exposure also would help
schools focus on programs that work, which in turn could return the objective of
testing to its original purpose - to help students learn better.
The alternative is to continue to climb the stairs of high-stakes testing and
leave all children in public schools behind.
l Orlando Sentinel “Off Target; Our Position: Too
Few Checks and Balances Are the Problem with standardized Tests” -- September
14, 2003
…A far bigger concern for parents is the government's growing desire to attach
high stakes to test scores without adequate independent checks on how it handles
the tests.
Florida's high stakes can change a life. High-school seniors who haven't passed
the 10th-grade FCAT -- 12,000 this year -- can't receive a diploma.
Third-graders who fail the FCAT reading test -- 43,000 this year -- must repeat
that grade, a stigma of failure many may struggle with throughout their
schooling….
But mistakes can happen in grading tests and schools, as state regulators
readily admit. No system is perfect. Human error is unavoidable. Yet Florida
continues to duck its responsibility for ferreting out such snags.
When parents want to see the FCAT their child flunked, for example, and check
the accuracy of scoring, they're out of luck. The state keeps every aspect of
the test secret, including the answers the state deems correct….
Parents have a right to expect the same kind of accountability from the state
that the state expects from students and public schools. If they really want to
protect their children's future, they'll lobby lawmakers to impose exacting
standards over the state's use of the FCAT.
l Sarasota Herald-Tribune – “Faith in FCAT
perfection may be misplaced when kids' futures at stake” -- September 25, 2003
By Tom Lyons
Since Gov. Jeb is going to continue with his wacky use of the FCAT to decide
which kids fail a grade, their parents should at least be able to see the tests
afterward.
How else can they have any confidence in that standardized test as an assessment
tool, especially when those test scores trigger major consequences for their
child? And, for that matter, how else can parents find out whatever the test
supposedly might reveal about their children's academic needs?
Yet the state has been appealing a court ruling by a judge in Pinellas County.
That judge, quite reasonably, decided that the father of a child who flunked the
FCAT is entitled to examine the testing materials.
The state's objection, supposedly, is that keeping the test totally secret saves
money. That's because a test can be reused each year with little or no reworking
if no copies have been seen by the public.
Well, if we are going to give this test so much power over kids, we just can't
be that chintzy.
Though an unexpected low test score might reveal a child's academic problems,
that is not the only possibility.
And the reasonable doubts of parents need not all be about whether the child
happens to be a poor test taker or maybe had a bad day while feeling so much
FCAT pressure.
There is also the possibility that the test score is just wrong. Maybe way
wrong.
As reported in a New York Times story that ran in the Herald-Tribune, that is
not a far-fetched suspicion. Companies that write, supply and grade major
standardized tests do make mistakes, and sometimes huge ones.
What if some questions were worded so sloppily that there really was no right
answer? What if more than one right answer is offered for a question, yet only
one is counted as right? And what if entire sections of the test were scored
using the wrong answer key?
All those things have happened, repeatedly, in standardized testing.
Some testing organizations have a low incidence of error, but none are perfect.
And thanks in part to growing use of standardized tests, even careful companies
can become so glutted with work that quality controls suddenly fail.
The results can be terrible. As you may have read, 8,000 kids in Minnesota were
wrongly flunked because the company scored some tests with the wrong answer key.
The same company has the job in Florida scoring the FCAT tests, by the way. So
it can happen here, and, for all I know, it has.
The state sure ought not insist that parents accept on faith that their child's
fate-determining FCAT scores are a true picture of that child's academic
performance. No such faith is justified.
That Minnesota goof made for a well-deserved and successful lawsuit by the 8,000
victims. The company paid serious money in part because corners had been cut on
quality control, and because by the time the error was discovered, the damage
had been done.
But at least the error was discovered. It must have been ego-salvaging news for
those kids when they learned it was the testing company that had failed, not
them.
Yet except in the few states that require that tests be open to inspection
afterward, many testing companies invoke total secrecy. That has to mean some
parents never find out that their kids were cheated.
Unless the secret hope is that embarrassing glitches will go undiscovered, it is
clearly better to have parents checking the tests. The more eyes poring over
them, especially the eyes of motivated and skeptical parents, the less likely a
testing company is to get away with shoddy work.
The governor says the FCAT is about holding schools accountable, but it is the
kids who most feel the sting of failure. So we should hold the testers
accountable, too.
l Tallahassee Democrat – “FCAT confidential:
Contents shouldn't be top secret” – November 11, 2003
The Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test is as powerful as it is controversial,
the results determining not only the academic fate of individual students but
also the grade given to public schools they attend. Despite the FCAT's influence
on so many Floridians, however, its contents have remained - as far as parents
are concerned - classified.In a case almost certainly headed to the Florida
Supreme Court, a Pinellas County father sued to see the exam his son failed two
years ago. Though a Leon County judge ruled that Steven Cooper should have at
least limited access to his son's FCAT booklets and answer sheets, the 1st
District Court of Appeal reversed that decision. Siding with the state
Department of Education, the court ruled last week that the FCAT is confidential
and therefore not subject to parental review.The state has argued that making
test questions public would compromise the FCAT's integrity, forcing its
re-creation every year. But it is perfectly reasonable to let parents see their
child's test under restricted conditions - for example, without the ability to
reproduce it or take it from the premises. That would allow them to assess their
child's strengths and weaknesses and challenge possible scoring errors. Besides,
the 1.6 million third- through 10th-graders who take the FCAT surely talk among
themselves about the specifics of this high-stakes exam.Denying parents access
to a test that profoundly affects their children runs counter to the FCAT mantra
of accountability.Moreover, such narrow access to what's on the test has the
effect of limiting discussion about the validity of the test itself and the
weight it is given. Does the FCAT encourage regurgitation of information at the
expense of critical thinking? Is the test culturally biased, as some claim?By
restricting access, the state suppresses that debate - hardly a healthy strategy
in a democracy that is supposed to value it.
l Bradenton Herald -- Why FCAT secrecy? Parents
should be able to review tests – November 21, 2003
Results of the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test can keep a third-grader
from advancing to fourth and a senior from receiving a diploma. But the test is
not an "official" school record and thus parents cannot see the text questions
to help them understand their failing child's weak areas.Or perhaps to detect
errors in the test.The ruling by a three-judge panel of the First District Court
of Appeal on a Leon County parent's suit to view his son's FCAT test reveals a
bizarre twist of the Florida School Code that obviously needs to be addressed by
the Legislature. If the judges are interpreting the law correctly - and three of
them do not necessarily reflect the view of the entire court - this is a grave
misapplication of privacy principles.In arguing for denying parents the chance
to see their child's FCAT, the State Department of Education argued that this
would destroy the test's security, forcing the administrator to write new tests
each year at a cost of $10 million.Considering the implications of this test on
students' lives, this is an incredibly weak argument. More than 57,000 students
either faced retention in third grade or denial of a high school diploma last
academic year. That represents a huge issue in their lives as well as those of
their families in terms of self-esteem, further education and job prospects.
Even if the fear of compromising test security were valid, $10 million is not a
huge cost if it means helping those kids pass. No child left behind,
right?Besides, we find it incredible that this all-important test wouldn't be
changed every year. You're testing the same skills; is it that difficult to
devise new questions on the same topics?Security need not be compromised if the
parent examines the test booklet in a carefully supervised environment. Only
someone with a photographic memory could cheat if an administrator were present
during the test examination; not many people have such abilities. Besides,
there's no fool-proof security system for the tests. Unscrupulous teachers or
administrators could copy them, although it's a criminal offense to do so. So if
a parent tried, subject them to the same penalties.Perhaps the real fear of DOE
honchos and politicians like Gov. Jeb Bush is that too much parental scrutiny
might turn up errors on the test. It's happened in other states. In Minnesota, a
father found six errors in his daughter's test, resulting in a reversal of the
outcome for her and 524 other seniors who had been unjustly denied diplomas. In
Massachusetts, a student found an incorrect answer on her exit exam, resulting
in 95 students who were given failing grades being allowed to graduate. In
Georgia, errors were found on that state's comprehensive test three years in a
row.Is it unrealistic to think Florida's FCAT might have errors? Of course
not.This ruling should be appealed to the full First District Court and to the
Florida Supreme Court, if necessary. Meanwhile, the Legislature should revisit
the School Code to amend the part that says a test with life-changing
consequences is not an "official" student record.
l St. Petersburg Times – “Fill in the blanks” --
December 1, 2003
An appeals court has now determined that Florida parents don't have a right to
see where their students are going wrong on standardized tests, but Gov. Jeb
Bush shouldn't be so eager to gloat. His win comes at the expense of students
who are being held back without really knowing why.
The governor portrayed his opposition to disclosing FCAT test materials as
consistent with "the Department of Education's 20-year policy on test
confidentiality," but that's a little disingenuous. Until four years ago, DOE
never used a standardized test to grade and punish schools. Until last spring,
it never used a state test of such complexity to decide whether high school
seniors could graduate. Until this fall, it never used a state test to decide
whether third-graders should be promoted or retained.
Because Florida has so dramatically increased the stakes associated with one
test, it owes students and teachers a better understanding of how they are
performing. It also owes them better assurance that testing error didn't lead to
grave consequences in their lives.
In 1999, according to a recent Boston College study, a question from a Tennessee
education statistician led to the discovery of incorrect scores for 250,000
students in six states. Those mistakes merely affected statistics; errors in
FCAT scoring could unjustly flunk a 9-year-old.
At least four other states already release test questions to students, and the
educational logic is so compelling that Bush's own lieutenant governor, Frank
Brogan, committed two years ago to doing the same in Florida. But Brogan is now
president of Florida Atlantic University, and his promise apparently no longer
counts.
The state does have a legitimate concern about the security of FCAT results and
the costs of producing new test questions each year if the old ones are made
public. But the interesting thing about the recent 1st District Court of Appeal
decision is how the appellate judges chided the trial judge whose opinion they
overturned.
They criticized Circuit Judge Janet Ferris for trying to provide "meaningful
access" for families through a supervised review of the test without the
possibility for copying it. In other words, Ferris was seeking a compromise,
hoping to help a Pinellas high school student and his family figure out where
he's going wrong without unduly compromising test security.
Ferris' effort may or may not have constituted proper jurisprudence, but it is
clearly sound education policy. This fight never belonged in the courts in the
first place, and might have been avoided if the governor weren't so stubborn.
Anxious families are just looking for some guidance on a test that affects the
lives of their sons and daughters. Why is it impossible to find a workable
middle ground?
[Also available in MS Word®]
