Citing an article in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Kimberly Swygert, on her terrific Number 2 Pencil, deftly reveals the flaws in the NAACP’s lawsuit aimed at blocking Florida’s Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) “until the achievement gap between minority and white students is eliminated.” (The NAACP’s brief is here.)
Kimberly makes a number of good points, but the one that particularly caught my attention is the following:
if you remove objective measures such as the FCAT that show minority youngsters are not gaining the skills they need, then you lose critical evidence that some schools are shortchanging their students and do need to change. Why does the NAACP want to get rid of evidence that minority students aren’t learning what they need to learn?
Why indeed.
In Florida the NAACP does not want the state to collect information that would identify poorly performing schools. By contrast, in California, as one of their primary arguments against Prop. 54, the Racial Privacy Initiative, the NAACP and its allies argue that the state must continue to collect racial information in order to monitor compliance with civil rights laws.
I would like to make a comment on the NAACP’s action. The FCAT is a tricky subject. Yes, it does provide information involving discrepancies between white and black students and there for is valuable. However, the problem with the FCAT is that students that are in poorer schools and have had little help outside of schools, due to lack of parental support or the lack of quality tutoring programs, are being failed and left behind because of poor FCAT scores. Teachers are forced to stay at a rate that keeps them at a FCAT test curriculum pace and the students that need extra help or extra explanations are left in the dust. The school has to keep up with the curriculum and the students are not always able to learn at that speed. Children are not like hamburgers and can not be taught or judged in any standard way. They are very distinct and many of these children are entering classrooms speaking a different language then academic English. Ebonics and Spanish are not the same as academic English. There are not wrong they are just different and they require more time to learn. Poorer kids from white families are having a difficult time keeping up with the FCAT standards in their schools as well. Finally, if a school does poorly on the FCAT overall then that school does not receive extra funding. The children that I am working with have been classified as learning disabled because they have not caught on to academic English yet and they use Ebonics in class. After failing once these children will be socially promoted until the third grade at which time they will fail due to poor FCAT scores due to the No Child Left Behind provision. There is a lack of funding in their school, and they have no teacher for learning disabilities hired yet this year and we are going entering into October. Schools are receiving additional funding based on overall FCAT scores. People say that the kids are lucky to have me help them with their schoolwork but I am a volunteer and I have very little time. Most of their parents work nights, some parents can not read and others are in jail. It is the schools responsibility to see to it that these children receive an education and if that means that they must know academic English then the schools had better get it together and start teaching it at a pace that this children can go. It is not fair that the drop out rate for African American kids is above average and it is due to poor elementary education. These kids are going to end up in jail – that is not funny. Children are not a resource to be used by the prison industrial complex. I support the NAACP’s action based on the fact that they know something is wrong and are trying anything to fix it. I only hope that it works.