State education officials have asked Duval County Public Schools to investigate test documents with "extremely unusual levels of erasures" at one school.
The Florida Department of Education recently sent the notification to 14 districts about results on the spring Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Duval and Flagler are the only districts in Northeast Florida to get the memo.
Full article here.
This diary was inspired by Laura Clawson, who penned about teachers cheating on standardized test scores in schools, and it hit very close to home for me. You see, Ms. D - being a teacher in an urban school environment - and I met while volunteering with my company's science enrichment program. She is directly affected by standardized testing, such as the FCATs.
At the end of this school year, she was fretting - at least in my perception of everything - her students' test scores. As I understand it, fifth grade is the first time science is tested in schools, and many schools elect not to teach science until fifth grade, so that they can instead focus teaching on areas that are tested.
Want to guess what Ms. D teaches? Well, taught.
See, the scoring goes from "1," meaning deficient, to "5," meaning proficient. A "3" is considered satisfactory. The highest score in her class? 3. And I can assure you, it's not from a lack of anything on Ms. D's behalf. This isn't me being biased. Her and her fifth grade co-teachers are all smart, engaging ladies.
As it turns out, due to the low scores, she and one of the other fifth grade co-teachers are being shuffled around, and will now be teaching different grade levels. Basically, one could view this as punishment for her students having low scores. Part of the hassles of working in an urban school environment, which is something Ms. D chooses to do.
The part that really bugs me is that by being honest, by teaching the students good material and trying to be a good teacher, when her students don't do so well, she and her coworkers get punished. Yet, if not for the visibility of cheating in school systems across the US, many of the teachers that cheat may never have been caught, their students passed to the next grade on higher scores, and in many cases, those teachers would be rewarded for their students' higher scores.
As the saying goes: no good deed goes unpunished.