'CLOSING THE GAP'
An educational race to the middle is clearly the wrong direction
BY KEN WARD

As in public schools everywhere, Florida’s teachers are taught to teach to the middle. Today’s diverse classroom conglomerations leave them little alternative. High-stakes testing like the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test aims that way, too. And, according to Jeb Bush, it’s working. Announcing the latest results last spring, the governor enthused that the “performance gap” between white students and their black and Hispanic peers was narrowing.

Indeed, the percentage of students scoring at grade level continues to climb — with the largest gains posted by minorities. Those numbers add up because minorities are now the majority in Florida’s public schools.

But there’s one statistic that’s not getting much ink: The percentage of pupils scoring in FCAT’s top echelon has fallen 13 percent since 2001.

Some research suggests that high-stakes testing, driven by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, is making the Bell curve steeper because it dedicates a disproportionate share of resources at the bottom of the scholastic totem pole in an effort to “close the (racial) gap.”

University of North Florida researcher J. Lee notes, “White students performed better when higher standards were emphasized.”

In light of rising minority enrollment, state and federal education officials are heeding Lee’s formula to lift average scores by emphasizing “basics” while pouring more money into remediation.

More than half of the $42 billion spent for the federal No Child Left Behind Act this year is earmarked for low-income Title I programs, “at-risk high school intervention,” English language acquisition, special education and something called “Reading First.”

On top of its $5.8 billion share from Washington, Tallahassee is laying out $186 million more for its own reading initiatives, plus summer institutes for principals at low-performing schools and “professional development courses” for teachers.

Over time, Florida has managed to move more pupils into the middle range of FCAT results. In a series of reading academies, the Florida Reading Initiative, for example, found that blacks had the largest single-year gains in a sample group in northern Florida. On the basis of “developmental scale scores,” Hispanics outperformed both blacks and whites. Statewide, minority students have outpaced whites in attaining grade-level FCAT scores. Likewise, the percentage of minorities taking Advanced Placement courses and the SAT exam has grown.

Still, it is noteworthy and troubling that the percentage of the highest-achieving students (FCAT Level 5) is shrinking.

The same scenario played out in Texas under then-Gov. George W. Bush. There, schools also reported robust improvement in minority scores, accompanied by, in some cases, declining white scores. (In one district, officials overly eager to narrow the ethnic gap were charged with manipulating results.)

Playing their own numbers game, Florida and other states have steadily expanded the definition of “special education” to include evermore students who can be exempted from taking FCAT. At the same time, the lion’s share of the exceptional-ed budget is gravitating to the most profoundly disabled children, at the expense of “gifted” students.

Floridians can be proud of the gains posted by their lower-functioning students. Reading, writing and computing at grade level surely is a worthwhile, if not elemental, goal. But a system or society that’s losing its best and brightest in a race to the middle is heading in the wrong direction. LW

DUMBED DOWN In a culture where a book titled All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten can become a best-seller, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reflects America’s move toward mediocrity. Testing white 17-year-old high-school students, NAEP shows flat-line performance during the past 30 years relative to the rest of the world — despite, or because of, all our specialized, targeted, multibillion-dollar educational initiatives. The sour fruits of these labors are displayed in our presidential debates. Former U.S. Assistant Education Secretary Diane Ravitch writes: “In the debates of 2000, George W. Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.7); Al Gore spoke at a high seventh-grade level (7.9). “Our contemporary politicians, who found it necessary to speak to us as sixth- and seventh-graders, compared unfavorably with Kennedy and Nixon, both of whom spoke in a vocabulary appropriate for 10th-graders. And they, in turn, looked sophomoric when compared to Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, whose scores, respectively, were 11.2 and 12.0 (in the days before compulsory government education). There’s a word for what’s going on here: ochlocracy. You might want to look it up.

Ken Ward was assistant managing editor of the Las Vegas Sun and a freelance columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He writes from Florida. E-mail him at kenricward@juno.com.