What's the word on FCAT? Central Florida students post mixed wr...

Love the way you try to headline that "it's not so good". Funny. Kids are improving across the board due to the FCAT or any process where kids have to "practice" as was indicated by the teacher in the article. Having something to shoot for and practice for is good. We do it in all parts of life and for some reason we act like education just happens by being in school 12 years.

It also may help highlight the issues in Osceola. If the rest of the districts or schools are improving and one is not, it may be because of the new influx of students or not adequate teacher. Regardless, the testing allows you to recognize that; w/o it, they would spiral as in the past for struggling communities.

Great work Floridians. We are leading in education innovation.

Very hard for some in Osceola County when English is a second language, not first!

As far as Orange County high schools are concerned, If you take all scores from just our high schools here in Orange County and average them out you come up with just under 50% of the students just barely keeping up with the minimum which is 52% for our district. That of course means that over 50% of our 10th graders are doing less than 10th grade curriculum and still being passed on toward graduation! Here is a quick synopsis of our high schools percentiles.....Evans-26%, Colonial-41%, Edgewater-47%, Oakridge-37%, Boone-61%, Celebration-51%, Dr. Phillips-64% Freedom-46%, Jones-43%, Timber Creek-62%, Winter Park-69%. Of the three lowest being Evans,Colonial, and Oak Ridge and the three highest Dr.Phillips, Olympia, and Winter Park! What really gets you is when you understand that these scores are up from 2007! Our schools are in sad shape to say the very least.

Actually it is not so good!! A paragraph containing misspellings, poor punctuation, and improper grammatical choices may pass the FCAT
criteria but will that pass in a global market? Thanks to the Sentinel for bringing up the facts.

Here is the question I would like to pose. Who decides what is average? If the highest percent was Winter Park with 69%, then maybe the expectations are really too high. As a math teacher, if I give a test to my students and what I consider my top students only score a 69 percent, I can tell you my test was not matching what was taught. It may have been either due to questions involving more skills involved that didn't appear needed at first glance or the students not getting enough practice. I will tell you the FCAT test is notorious for having questions that require multiple skills involved in order to solve the problem. Given this, the FCAT test is not a very good diagnostic tool, because it doesn't have a range questions to properly address where a student's weakness is. If the student found 2 answers needed to solve the problem, but then made a mistake on the last part. You don't really know if the student didn't know any of it or knew most of it.

FCAT stinks.