Florida’s change to school rating system called ‘scam’
In the if-you-don’t-like-the-rules-just-change-them category:Last year, Florida gave a new standardized writing test to students in various grades and the scores were awful: Only 27 percent of fourth-graders had proficient scores, down from the previous year’s 81 percent. So the state’s Board of Education voted to lower the passing score on this exam.
This week, the same board voted to change the system that assigns letter grades to each school based largely on test scores. The system was pioneered under Jeb Bush, who was governor from 1999-2007 and has become a national leader of corporate-influenced school reform he implemented in Florida. A number of states, including Virginia, have adopted versions of Bush’s system to grade schools, which is based nearly exclusively on test scores. There are high stakes to the school grades: Schools can be closed if they get too many F’s, parents buy houses to get into high-scoring schools, etc.
The board became worried that as many as a third of public schools would see plummeting grades when new school grades are released in the coming weeks because new and supposedly higher standards will result in lower student test scores. So what did it do? By a 4 to 3 vote, it declared that no
