Bureaucratic Nightmare

Leave it to the Florida Department of Education to render even the most intelligent folks in the area flummoxed.

For some time, high school and district administrators lobbied that the state’s grading formula – and school grades have become a focal benchmarks for school achievement and state dollars – is biased against high schools.

So the state changed it.

Through a bill passed last year by the Florida Legislature, the focus on determining high school grades has been changed.

The results from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test will now count toward half of a high school’s grade.

Since only freshmen and sophomores take the FCAT, administrators had long argued, that test never was a proper snapshot of what was going on in the high schools.

Of course, as a digression, there has never been any love lost in this space for the FCAT.

Sure, there needs to be some school accountability, but pushing the results of one test through some kind of grinder of a formula to determine a school’s successes or failures – please.

But what the state decided to do with high schools is for the FCAT to count for 50 percent of a high school’s grade, with the other 50 percent based on access and success in accelerated course work – in Gulf County that would mean things like dual enrollment – as well as graduation and drop-out rates as well as college readiness as determined on college entrance tests, the SAT or ACT.

In theory, this seems dandy, but as was underscored by a recent workshop in which representatives from Gulf, Bay, Calhoun and Franklin counties heard about the changes first-hand from Juan Copa of the Department of Education, theory and practice have different meanings.

While most administrators ended the day with a feeling that it would help their high schools – under the new formula, given increases in dual enrollment in the county’s public high schools as well as graduation and drop out rates, those schools might have earned “A” grades – there was confusion.

There is no doubt, as Copa said, that there would be a high correlation between what freshmen and sophomores might score on the FCAT and what juniors and seniors are doing to become college ready.

Copa also noted that the new formula was intended to use graduation rates as a high school’s bottom line and provide incentives for ramping up advanced programs for high school students.

The new formula provides weights, or multipliers, for access and performance in accelerated programs, meaning more calculating and paperwork for district administrators.

The formula is confusing, heavy in minutiae and again changes what seems to change on an almost yearly basis, and in this case changes it just for high schools. There’s a headache for a small district.

More troubling for some is that special diplomas, those provided to special education students or students with learning or physical disabilities, would not count toward graduation rates.

The student would essentially not count as having been to high school, as far as the state sees it.

Though of little impact in Gulf County, students in certain programs would also be counted as, well, non-students.

And due to the factors that now come into play regarding juniors and especially seniors, school grades will not be released for high schools until November of the following school year, so state funding tied to school grades will be an unknown, another way school districts must fly blind on budget projections for the following year.

But most amazing aspect of this whole exercise, it took the DOE some 15 months or so to come up with formula, is that the FCAT itself changes next year.

Yep, the test on which 50 percent of this is based will change next year.

And the formula itself will change, rolling freshmen and sophomores into the new half of the formula, in two years.

Therefore, in review, the DOE has created one high school grading formula, separate from other schools, for two years. The state will change the FCAT next year. The high school grading formula changes again in two years.

Bureaucracy at its finest.