FCAT vs. Tenure
We had an interesting conversation around the lunch table today at work. It's election day and the Governor of Florida is up for grabs. One of the major topics is the FCAT test. This is the standardized test that we us in Florida to grade schools, teachers, and administrators on how well or poorly they are doing. I'm guessing it's used for funding purposes as well...better performers get more money, poorer performers get less. The buzz seems to be that teachers are teachingto the test, students are under extreme pressure, notes go home during FCAT week about good breakfast and lots of sleep (side note: why not food and sleep the other 51 weeks/year?).
My thoughts are, if we didn't have tenure or teachers' unions that harbored lousy teachers and administrators...would we really need the FCAT?
posted by Hollywood at 9:25 AM
1 Comments:
We've got the exact same discussion on the Texas assessment. Teaching effectively ceases the day after the tests are administered...and one school even has math every day to prepare for that section (then, oddly, after their math score improved too dramatically, they were investigated to determine if there'd been fraud) and there's a myriad of blog entries on mine about this.
But, being the son of both a teacher and a steelworker, suffice to say that tenure can be a good thing if earned for the right reasons (there's a reason universities award that status) and unions can be a good thing from a laborer's perspective.
5:30 AM
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