Guest Author
My daughter’s report card arrived home last week. Belatedly. She had been out of town and her charter school refused to mail it. My daughter collected it in person. For her, the news was good but somewhat ambiguous. But for us, the parents, it meant more questions than answers.
For her classes, my daughter earned five A’s and one B.
“Math?” I asked. Definitely.
Math has been a lingering struggle for her throughout middle school. Her math grades see-sawed from C’s to A’s depending on whether she could understand the heavy accent of her Turkish-born instructor.
For FCAT, she earned a 5 in reading and a 4 in, you guessed it, math. Last year after she received a 4 instead of a 5 for writing, she came home in tears. Grades matter to her. I hope they always will.
Which brings us to the final part of her report card: EOC — End of Course testing. She rocked civics. But algebra was a different story. She earned a 396; she failed. A pass requires 399 or higher. A classmate scored lower on her FCAT math but passed ECO algebra. Oh, the perils of parenting a teenage girl.
It turns out that End of Course testing signals the end of FCAT. This is part of what the Florida Department of Education calls the “Next Generation Strategic Plan.” Every few years we get hit by a new gimmick for “increasing student achievement and improving college and career readiness.”
I know college readiness when I see it and too many of our students aren’t even close. Too many of them enter college treating commas and periods as if they are strangers; they have read neither “The Catcher in the Rye” nor “Native Son.” When you correct their poor grammar, they reply, “Nobody ever taught me that; I thought I was a good writer.”
They are poorly schooled and ill-prepared. Which brings me back to EOC and the FCAT and my daughter. The introduction of EOC comes against a backdrop of the cantankerous debate about Common Core, the national push to elevate the quality of students graduating from high school.
I am 11 years deep into the experiment that is Florida public education. And as any parent of school children knows, public education is a continuous churn about what works and what doesn’t, all colored by large doses of ideology and politics.
My daughter is among the first group of students to benefit from the voter-approved state pre-K. She heads to the eighth grade this fall. (It would be interesting if we can compare the students who benefitted from pre-K and their counterparts who didn’t.)
She’s a reader. I’ve seen her write sentences college students would covet. She has competed in science fairs and science Olympiads around the state. But math remains a puzzle. So this summer she spends four hours a week in math tutoring.
It’s a sacrifice, but each time the tutor’s correspondence arrives in the mail, it’s a timely reminder that in the calculus of public education, the parents, because of the choices we make or avoid, are the X-factor. And all the fuss about Common Core, FCAT or EOC, is merely a sideshow.
Andrew J. Skerritt is author of Ashamed to Die: Silence, Denial and the AIDS Epidemic in the South. He lives in Tallahassee. Follow him on Twitter @andrewjskerritt. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
