“You Guys Contrived This System”
Writing in the Orlando Sentinel, its clear that columnist Scott Maxwell has had it with FCAT and the policy-makers who brought it to us:
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.