By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN and WILLIAM M. HARTNETT
Palm Beach Post Staff Writers
When state officials introduced the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test three years ago, they billed it as an innovative way to judge the performance of individual schools and teachers, tying millions of incentive dollars to students' scores.
But an analysis by The Palm Beach Post shows that the FCAT might have been a better barometer of student wealth than of school quality.
From the Panhandle to the Keys, schools that serve the most affluent students have consistently received the highest scores - and a disproportionate share of millions in state recognition money.
The Post's analysis of test scores and measures of family income at more than 2,000 elementary and middle schools graded by the state in the 2000-2001 academic year found that:
Though the state spends more per student overall at poorer schools, local educators said they were disappointed, but not entirely surprised, that the bulk of FCAT incentive money under Florida's A+ Plan has gone to affluent schools.
"The correlation between poverty and minority status and the school grade is very, very high," said Palm Beach County Schools Superintendent Art Johnson. "And so the grade is rewarding the reality of who's rich and who's poor."
State officials dismissed the poverty issue when they implemented the grading system in 1999, saying that all children can learn. The Post analysis, however, shows that poor students have not done as well on the test as their wealthier peers.
Gov. Jeb Bush, who led the push for financial incentives for successful schools and private school vouchers for children at failing schools, referred comment on The Post's findings to his spokeswoman. Elizabeth Hirst said the state's plan to change the way schools are graded will eliminate the disparity in the distribution of money.
The changes, to be considered by the state Board of Education on Tuesday, would still give recognition money to schools that earn an A or improve by at least one letter grade.
The new formula would still incorporate students' one-time test scores but would reduce their weight to about half of a school's grade. The other half would be based on the improvement of individual students from year to year. Special emphasis would be placed on improvement of the lowest-scoring students.
"By measuring learning gains, we are now not just taking into account well-off students who have always performed well, but we are focusing on poorer children within a school who may be at the lower tier . . . but who have the most potential to show learning gains," Hirst wrote in a statement to The Post.
School superintendents in Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties agreed that the new grading system would allow them to prove some of the progress being made in poorer schools, where students start off far behind their more affluent peers.
But it is far too early to tell, they agreed, whether the new plan will give schools with many poor students a fair chance to earn recognition money.
Those extra incentive dollars are important to schools in poor communities, said Shelley Vana, president of Palm Beach County's Classroom Teachers Association.
"It's almost appalling to think that the schools that have the highest number of children living in poverty would be getting the smallest portion, the least dollars," Vana said.
Schools in affluent communities can provide much more for their students, she said.
But educators emphasized that, overall, the schools with the poorest students receive more money.
Palm Beach County, for example, spent about $6,550 per student last year at South Bay's Rosenwald Elementary, where 99 percent of students receive free or reduced-price lunches. In contrast, the district spent about $3,300 per student at Acreage Pines Elementary in Loxahatchee, where only 15 percent of students participate in the lunch program.
Still, the FCAT-based incentives are far more than symbolic: The state has spent about $185 million on them in the past three years.
The stark difference in test scores between rich and poor schools raises difficult questions about how to fairly measure school quality.
Several school superintendents told The Post that the FCAT, which was designed to gauge student performance, has been misused as a way to measure teaching ability.
The statute that created the Florida School Recognition Program described standardized test performance as a way to identify "outstanding faculty and staff in highly productive schools."
The problem with that premise, some educators say, is that the best teacher in the poorest school may not get better results than the worst teacher in the richest, Vana said.
"There is still a belief out there that if you take that faculty from an A school to a D or F school everything would be fine," she said. "But they would face the same challenges."
Indeed, many studies of state test scores have found that affluent students tend to do well, no matter where they go to school.
The Post performed a statistical analysis that shows up to 68 percent of the difference in individual school's scores can be attributed to poverty alone - much more than 10 other factors, including class size, per-pupil expenditure, and teacher education and experience.
Alfie Kohn, author of the book Schools our Children Deserve and perhaps the country's most outspoken opponent of high-stakes standardized testing, said that The Post's findings indicate the FCAT is not a measure of school quality at all.
Instead, Kohn said, state standardized tests are "an exquisitely accurate measure of the size of the houses near a school."
"When I speak around the country on fairness and funding issues attached to the current testing mania, I typically cite Florida as a cautionary tale of what thoughtful educators should resist," he said.
State Sen. Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie, said that the FCAT has helped schools find failing students in need of special attention.
"Is the system perfect? Absolutely not," Pruitt said. "Do we have a long way to go to make it more equitable and fair for everyone? Yes we do. But this was never intended to be the sole barometer of school success and failure."
Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie school officials take poverty and other demographic factors into account when analyzing their own statistics. And Orange County sends home an annual report to parents that describes how their child's school did compared to others that serve students of comparable wealth.
Viewed on their own, FCAT letter grades encourage a simplistic approach to evaluating schools that can mislead parents into believing that poor schools are bad schools, said Orange County Superintendent Ronald Blocker.
"Parents in poor areas of town get tired of hearing negative messages," he said. "There could be some really dynamic things going on in that school that were not reflected in the School Accountability Program."
The Post's statistical analysis compares local schools' test scores to those with similar economic profiles across all of Florida.
The result: Some D schools are performing much better than The Post's statistical model predicts, and some A schools are not doing as well as they appear.
For example, Calusa Elementary in Boca Raton did worse in both reading and math than most schools in the state with the same percentage (34 percent) of students on free or reduced-price lunches. Yet the school received an A.
State officials, however, say they have no interest in comparing test scores to poverty because it creates a separate set of expectations for rich and poor students. All children can learn, Bush contends, so they all should be held to the same high standards - anything less is "misguided compassion" that smacks of defeatism and breeds failure.
When FCAT scores were released in May, Education Commissioner Charlie Crist singled out improvement at the 14 schools that increased their grade from D to A.
"Socioeconomic status is not a factor in a child's ability to learn," Crist said. "This data puts that myth to rest."
Crist failed to mention that more than 200 D schools remained a D. The state's D schools averaged 87 percent of their students on free or reduced-price lunch.
Richard Hughes, principal of Highland Elementary in Lake Worth, doesn't have much patience for state officials who dismiss the obstacles faced by students and teachers at his school.
"Socioeconomic status makes a big difference. To ignore that is foolish. . . . The FCAT is a joke," Hughes said.
About 56 percent of Highland fourth-graders scored in the top three FCAT achievement levels in reading this year, a remarkable rate considering their backgrounds, he said.
When describing the advantages that affluent students have over Highland kids, Hughes doesn't bother with the trimmings - museum trips, fancy preschools, college-educated parents.
He lists the basics: "Clothes. Food. Shelter."
"We've got kids who get two meals a day - free breakfast and free lunch," Hughes said. "We've got students who don't have enough beds at home, so they sleep on the floor."
Hughes doesn't believe his kids are doomed to low scores - he has proved his school can rank among the state's best.
In 2000, Highland Elementary improved from a D to an A. With nine out 10 of its students on free or reduced-price lunch and nearly all from non-English speaking homes, the Lake Worth school was visited by reporters and lauded as a testament to possibility.
Highland dropped to a C this year.
The school's dedicated teachers are still working long hours, and students are still making two years' worth of progress in one year's time, Hughes said. Indeed, according to The Post's analysis, Highland is still doing better in reading than most schools with comparable student wealth across the state.
But its math score dropped slightly, disqualifying it from another A.
This year, there was no school recognition money. And Hughes doesn't expect much from the proposed grading system that will be discussed Tuesday, either.
"It will fall short," he predicted.
Every lawmaker and educator interviewed by The Post agreed there is a need for a new grading system and believes that the state's proposal is an improvement.
However, most said that it leaves much to be done.
Pruitt said he supports a more flexible "sliding scale" to acknowledge that D schools face greater challenges than the perennial A schools.
"I don't want to take anything away from a school that earns an A," he said. "But a school that goes from a D to a B deserves far more recognition and reward than a school that goes from a B to an A."
The accountability system that Superintendent Johnson envisions would set a series of performance benchmarks. Individual schools would either meet the standards or fall short. No degrees of success or failure. Just yes or no.
"If the goal here is to get everybody up to a standard, than let's figure out what that standard is and get everybody up to it," he said.
As long as the state's accountability system ignores poverty, local superintendents said, they will continue performing their own calculations. Analyzing factors such as family income is essential to sound policy making, Johnson said: "Otherwise, you're making blind decisions."
Department of Education spokeswoman JoAnn Carrin said the state has not studied whether the new grading system will perpetuate inequalities in the distribution of reward money, or how it could change school grades.
"Of course, we haven't seen the results (of the proposed grading system) . . . but we do believe it will level the playing field," Carrin said. "I think it is like the nirvana of school accountability."
Copyright 2001 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
December 16, 2001 Sunday
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