FCAT failures show test-obsessed teaching falls short
To fully appreciate how deeply flawed Tallahassee's approach to public education is, you must look beyond the recent news of abysmal FCAT scores — and look at how we got here.
You see, FCAT was supposed to be a simple fix for a complicated problem.
If we could just get our students to pass this standardized test, supposedly everything would be swell.
So we cut back everything from science curriculum to art classes to focus on these tests.
And we spent hundreds of millions of tax dollars paying companies to develop and grade them.
Teachers were no longer trusted to teach.
Everyone was made to bow down at the almighty altar of FCAT.
Yet this year — after more than a decade of FCAT obsession — more than 70 percent of our fourth-