Chapter Forty-Nine: When Numbers Don't Count

Chapter 49: When Numbers don’t Count

We spent a lot of time preparing for the standardized tests known as FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Tests). Most public schools are able to dedicate one staff person, usually a counselor, to focus almost exclusively on FCAT for the months leading up to testing. We don’t have this luxury. This year Rosie volunteered to project manage FCAT but since she still had classes to run and children to counsel, it fell to me to attend many of the training sessions and then train the faculty. The additional workload kept expanding and as the testing dates approached we found it necessary to work on weekends. I joined several of my staff members in my office on a Saturday morning to bubble in the labels on score sheets for all the students who arrived after September and thus lack pre-printed forms (most of our students!).

As the FCAT week approached I grew increasingly concerned about my staff’s ability to correctly administer the tests as well as my students’ ability to perform. The FCAT test prep isn’t just about how to take the test, but how to behave during the testing. My faculty spent a long time going over the rules and citing the misbehaviors that would result in a zero on the FCAT. Amazingly, I need not have worried. With only a couple rare exceptions, the Prospect students followed the all FCAT rules. While testing was underway the school was silent. I actually heard a bird chirping when I walked across campus. The walkie-talkies didn’t squeal, students didn’t go AWOL or shout profanity. All was quiet on the Prospect front. The week of FCAT testing was the calmest week of the year and it makes me wonder how often could we administer standardized tests and still get this level of compliance!

Why were the students so compliant, so well behaved? Did the rigid structure of the testing situation comfort them? Did they find the simple rules -start, bubble in, no questions, no talking, no grey areas - to be a relief? Prospect students have demonstrated time and again their lack of respect for, or fear of, parents, teachers and police officers, yet they seriously follow all the rules for FCAT’s. Could it be they feel the tests are fair and objective in ways all those “authority figures” are not?

In Florida, scores on the FCAT are used to determine not only which children are failing but also which schools are failing. One of the provisions of the federal education law “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) is that failing schools will be taken over by the state or turned into Charter Schools and in some instances, the children who attend these failing schools will be given the opportunity to transfer to another school.

Although the students at Prospect take the FCAT, their scores are have never been used to evaluate the quality of education offered at Prospect. This surprises me since Prospect is a Title One school and the law states if a Title One school fails for two consecutive years, parents must be given a choice of schools to which their child can transfer.


When Prospect students take the FCAT, their individual scores count and are entered into their “permanent school records” with failing scores often used to justify retaining them. But, unlike public schools, the score that represents the entire Prospect student body is not reported. This intentional omission reminds me of the cliché: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

Shortly after I became the principal of Prospect, I started asking how to make the school score for Prospect count. My liaison, Henry, is mystified as to why I would want to do this. If Prospect was given a letter grade, Henry explains, we wouldn’t do better than an “F.” I know this but I also know that schools that receive an “F” are given additional funds and resources to help them improve and schools that do improve (move from an F to a D for example) are awarded money to reward their progress. I want this money for my school and I also want another tool to gauge my success in improving academics at Prospect.

Henry advises me to call Deirdre, the person in charge of guidance for Herald County Public Schools. Deirdre says not counting Prospect scores isn’t an omission, it’s the law. She explains that she can’t count Prospect scores because we didn’t meet the legal minimum required number of students taking the FCAT. I tell her I am looking at the numbers and that actually we did. She agrees, then says we can’t count Prospect scores because those students who took the FCAT weren’t also on the rolls the prior October . I don’t have that data at my fingertips to refute or support her claim, but I suspect we might meet that criteria as well and I tell her even if we didn’t meet it last year, with the increase in our student population, we’ll surely meet it this year. Whereupon Dierdre tells me we’ll have to meet it for two consecutive years. My conversation with Deirdre makes it clear to me that Herald County does not want to include Prospect data in the county’s NCLB profile. Herald County has gone two years without an “F” school and they don’t want one now.

As Dierdre and I conclude our discussion, I realize I have neither the facts to successfully argue my case, nor the time to investigate and gather the necessary data. The provisions and criteria of NCLB are complex enough that few people have a thorough understanding of how the scores are computed let alone all the loopholes and nuances of this law. Principals and other administrators believe they have a handle on the subject until they attempt to reassure perplexed parents at which point they realize they too are unclear on many of the provisions of these state and federal education measurements. Like the state certification laws, often a school district has one person who has attended all the training sessions and read all the memos and is the resident expert. In Herald County, Deirdre has that authority and is frequently called upon to answer questions, clarify and demystify. She is the FCAT gatekeeper and it appears her marching orders are to interpret and use every regulation to keep Alternative School test scores from “polluting” the public school numbers. Deirdre is good at her job; Prospect scores will not count against the district.

Free-market driven, measure-by-objective, professionals look at my students as dandelions whose presence prevents an otherwise beautiful lawn from producing the desired result for all to see. The weeds must be pulled. This is their moral imperative. To allow the weeds to remain blights what otherwise would be pristine, productive yards. To leave the weeds weakens the whole, lowering the overall effect of a fine lawn. In the rush to pull, my students are transferred from the classrooms in which they were reducing productivity, and transplanted to Prospect – a weed farm. Separated, segregated and ostracized from the beautiful lawns, they are shut away and forgotten. The weed pullers point to the improved results coming from their newly weed free lawns, and point out the resiliency of weeds as proof that all parties are doing well. In fact the folks who objectively judge beautiful lawns (with the gardening tool of choice: FCATs) can tell us how much better those lawns are now than they were before. The shame is they can’t seem to find the weed farm to judge how it’s doing. Curious how the well intentioned weed pullers don’t see the value in judging all the lawns, but only those which they’ve spent time and money working on, while they hide the weed farm behind the fence.

I look at the dandelions and see not weeds, but flowers. Fragile flowers, in serious danger of wilting. They need at least as much support as the beautiful grass lawns, and as anyone who can really see, knows, they need a lot more.