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Kunst
For Governor!
Kunst/Miklowitz
on the FCAT
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HomepageStolen ElectionStolen ParadiseStolen FreedomsStolen LivesWar on TerrorContributeBob Kunst bioBob's ScheduleMediaPicturesClick
to subscribe to theoralmajority Newsletter Read Report on The Roots of Violence in America by James W. Prescott, Phd, formerly of NIHCD.
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The FCAT and other high-stakes standardized testing is a poor way to measure students and schools. Any fair and thorough assessment of educational progress must rely on multiple measures of student achievement -- not a single flawed, secret standardized test. Even the test manufacturers themselves do not support the use of one test score as the basis for high stakes decisions such as promotion, graduation, and school funding. Classroom assessments, teacher observations, performance tasks, work samples, and other inventories provide a much richer picture of what children know and can do (as well as the kind of help they might need) than the FCAT ever could. A veteran language arts teacher of more than 20 years in Escambia and Bay counties, observed, "FCAT distorts and cannibalizes the curriculum in many ways, but one of the most egregious is in writing instruction. Because the FCAT rewards writing in a five-paragraph format, students write little else during the school year. Instead of creating meaningful essays, stories, reports, and poems for real-world purposes and audiences, they write on assigned topics in artificial forms that produce dull, mechanical prose no one would ever choose to read and write. "Canned commercial curricula and scripted programs replace critical thinking, and our schools become giant test-prep centers," said Gloria Pipkin of Panama City. It is an absolute disgrace and gamble for schools, and this Governor, to exploit a child's performance on FCAT as a way to gets money. It lowers the standards and dehumanizes the entire process. It neither respects the students nor the teachers, who are pawns for absurd funding schemes only Bush could manufacture. It's a ruse for another failed policy. Bush could care less about kids, as he treats all of us
in Fla. as expendable.
Copyright 2002 kunstforgov.com
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