{"id":21819,"date":"2014-04-14T05:05:41","date_gmt":"2014-04-14T09:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/?p=21819"},"modified":"2014-04-14T08:57:12","modified_gmt":"2014-04-14T12:57:12","slug":"remembering-fcat-1995-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2014\/04\/14\/remembering-fcat-1995-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering FCAT, 1995-2014"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"This<\/a>

Photo by Norm Robbie (Flickr) \/ Illustration by Sammy Mack<\/p>

This is the last year Florida students will sit for the FCAT.<\/p><\/div>\n

The\u00a0Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test<\/a>\u00a0is dying, say Florida education officials. By this time next year, the\u00a0FCAT\u00a0will be replaced with a new, Common Core-aligned assessment.<\/p>\n

FCAT\u00a0was born in 1995 in the humid June of a Tallahassee summer.<\/p>\n

The Florida Commission on Education Reform and Accountability under\u00a0Gov. Lawton Chiles gave birth to the test. It was part of a series of recommendations that were meant to give local districts more control and a better sense of how their schools were doing.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt some point we may look fondly at the\u00a0FCAT\u00a0and wish we had it back,\u201d says Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association \u2014 the umbrella organization for Florida\u2019s teachers unions.<\/p>\n

Eventually, Ford and the\u00a0FEA\u00a0would become outspoken rivals of\u00a0FCAT, but the relationship didn\u2019t sour immediately.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt gave me information as a classroom teacher,\u201d recalls Ford. \u201cUnfortunately it was used as a political football to be the decision-maker for every decision that anybody wanted to tie to a test.\u201d\nhttps:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/files\/2014\/04\/FCAT_obit_SD_web.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/p>\n

RISE TO POWER<\/strong><\/p>\n

From the beginning,\u00a0FCAT\u00a0and its twin, the\u00a0Sunshine State Standards<\/a>, were inseparable.<\/p>\n

The standards determined what Florida schoolchildren should know by the end of the year and\u00a0FCAT\u00a0was there to test them on it.<\/p>\n

But the turning point in\u00a0FCAT\u2019s\u00a0rise to power came in 1999, when Governor Jeb Bush tied the\u00a0FCAT\u00a0scores to school grades. In short order, the grades were factored into funding, student advancement and whether a school required intervention.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt least among reformers around the country, Florida gets a lot of credit for it,\u201d says Sandy\u00a0Kress\u00a0who was one of the architects of President George W. Bush\u2019s No Child Left Behind Act.<\/p>\n

Kress\u00a0says Florida\u2019s A-F school grade innovation was influential on a national level.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we were trying to do really was to take these ideas that were pioneered in these early states and conform federal policy to them,\u201d says\u00a0Kress.<\/p>\n

But as\u00a0FCAT\u2019s\u00a0influence grew, so did its opponents.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the time you really felt threatened if you didn\u2019t buy into the old\u00a0FCAT\u00a0business \u2014 it was like you were being disloyal,\u201d says\u00a0ReLeah\u00a0Cossett\u00a0Lent, who was part of the early chorus of\u00a0FCAT\u00a0opponents. She taught English in Bay County, Fla., and became a leader in the Florida Coalition for Assessment Reform.<\/p>\n

Because of her fight with\u00a0FCAT, Lent went on to become a full-time education consultant and activist. She\u2019s written nine books about literacy, censorship and testing issues.<\/p>\n

When she first received\u00a0FCAT\u00a0prep booklets at her classroom, Lent was horrified by the content.<\/p>\n

\u201cLong, boring passages with all of these multiple-choice questions,\u201d she recalls. \u201cSo I just took them all and put them in my closet. And my closet in my room was just full from bottom to top of all these test booklets.\u201d<\/p>\n

AMBIVALENT STUDENTS<\/strong><\/p>\n

FCAT\u2019s\u00a0relationship with students was also complicated.<\/p>\n

Ryan Pham \u2014 who graduated in 2008 and is now working in marketing in Atlanta \u2014 didn\u2019t love\u00a0FCAT, but he did share a serendipitous moment with it once, in elementary school at the North Dade Center for Modern Languages.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was a pretty big reader, my mom was an English teacher,\u201d says Pham. The Boxcar Children stories were some of his favorite in elementary school. So when he got his\u00a0FCAT\u00a0test, he remembers being excited to find them there.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember opening the test using my No. 2 pencil to break the seal, and just feeling a sense of excitement about reading this box car kids passage,\u201d says Pham.<\/p>\n

But for Brian Vaughn, a senior at Spruce Creek High school in Port Orange, the most indelible interaction with\u00a0FCAT\u00a0was his last. Vaughn had been up all night working on an English paper before taking his\u00a010th\u00a0grade\u00a0FCAT\u00a0on a computer. He finished, fell asleep, and woke up in an empty room an hour-and-a-half later.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith my head on the desk and half of the lights were on, and the proctor was gone,\u201d remembers Vaughn.<\/p>\n

He passed, but that interaction with\u00a0FCAT\u00a0became a metaphor.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe let our students fall asleep in boring environments with high-stakes testing,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

FCAT\u00a0SUCCESSOR<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even though\u00a0FCAT\u00a0came into this world before he was governor, Jeb Bush is widely viewed as its surrogate father \u2014 the man who helped\u00a0FCAT\u00a0ascend to power.<\/p>\n

When StateImpact Florida spoke to Bush a year-and-a-half ago, it was clear that\u00a0FCAT\u00a0was on its way out. Bush seemed sanguine about\u00a0FCAT\u2019s\u00a0departure, knowing that it would be survived by a new assessment:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe\u00a0FCAT\u00a0— the dreaded\u00a0FCAT\u00a0that gives all children acne and makes then nauseous during the testing period — it will be replaced with a new test that will measure competency based on new standards,\u201d said Bush.<\/p>\n

But a replacement for FCAT wasn\u2019t chosen until this spring. The non-profit American Institutes for Research was chosen to design the new test. It\u2019s still in development, which is a huge concern for teachers and superintendents.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith the death of the\u00a0FCAT, it\u2019s almost one of those, \u2018I didn\u2019t like you but I miss you’ [things] — almost. Because what\u2019s about to come may not be as clear as what the\u00a0FCAT\u00a0was,\u201d says Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools.<\/p>\n

Students and teachers will be paying their respects to FCAT one last time through May 2.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test\u00a0is dying, say Florida education officials. By this time next year, the\u00a0FCAT\u00a0will be replaced with a new, Common Core-aligned assessment. FCAT\u00a0was born in 1995 in the humid June of a Tallahassee summer. The Florida Commission on Education Reform and Accountability under\u00a0Gov. Lawton Chiles gave birth to the test. It was part of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":147,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15],"tags":[721,1019,1026],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21819"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/147"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21819"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21823,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21819\/revisions\/21823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}