13,000 3rd Graders Face Retention

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(from the Miami Herald)

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Posted on Mon, Jan. 20, 2003 Florida set to tighten reins on promoting third-graders

BY STEVE HARRISON

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Florida is poised to clamp down even harder on social promotion -- more gloomy news for 13,000 Miami-Dade and Broward third-graders who could be held back this year.

A law passed last spring requires most third-graders who score at the lowest level on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test to repeat third grade.

One exception: children with acceptable scores on an approved test other than the FCAT.

The state Board of Education will take a long-awaited vote Tuesday on what the alternative tests will be -- but educators say the two tests being considered won't help many students move on to fourth grade.

''That will allow maybe 10 percent of our Level 1 FCAT students to pass, at best,'' said Gisela Feild, executive director of the division of data quality management in Miami-Dade County.

The board's vote will further solidify Gov. Jeb Bush's goal of having all third-graders read -- even if tens of thousands of 8- and 9-year-olds must be retained.

The impact could be felt beyond the students themselves: Schools could be forced to move fourth-grade teachers into third grade next year, and third-grade class sizes could rise with the extra students.

The alternative assessments the Board of Education will consider at its meeting in Miami Tuesday are two similar tests.

• One is a portion of the FCAT that measures how Florida students perform compared with their peers nationally. That is known as the FCAT NRT (norm-referenced test).

• The other is the SAT-9, which is usually taken by first- and second-graders. The SAT-9 can be given once before the school year ends.

ON THE LOW SIDE

Statistics suggest that Feild's 10 percent passing estimate may be optimistic.

At Fort Lauderdale's Croissant Park Elementary School last year, 67 fourth-graders scored in the lowest FCAT reading level.

Of those, only two scored in the 51st percentile on the FCAT NRT. That score means that a child answered more questions correctly than 51 percent of the population in his or her grade.

It's unlikely that a student who scored at the bottom of Florida's FCAT will score that high on the NRT, which is given a week after the FCAT.

Cary Sutton, director of research services in Broward, said the benchmarks appear to be geared toward literate students who, for an unforeseen reason, have a disastrous FCAT performance.

A CORRELATION

''Everyone can do badly on one test,'' Sutton said. ``You can stub your toe on the way to school, or feel bad that day. But there is a correlation between the Sunshine State Standards [the FCAT] and the NRT. If you score low on one, you generally score low on the other.''

Miami-Dade officials estimated that as many as 8,300 third-graders could have been held back last year -- nearly a third of approximately 28,000 third-graders.

Broward County hasn't estimated how many third-graders could be affected this year, but last year, 4,685 third-graders scored at Level 1 of the FCAT -- nearly 25 percent.

The law passed by the Legislature last year closed almost every avenue for promoting third-graders who scored poorly on the FCAT. A huge change: Special-education students who take the FCAT must now clear the same promotion hurdles as any other student.

Non-English speakers will continue to be promoted, as will students whose teachers and principals compile a portfolio of work that proves the children can read.

WIGGLE ROOM

Most educators have historically been opposed to retention, believing it damages a child's self-esteem. When the former, more lenient policy was applied to fourth-graders last year, less than 3 percent of fourth-graders in Broward and less than 2 percent in Miami-Dade were retained.

But the portfolio will still give educators some wiggle room to promote students with poor scores. The portfolio is supposed to show that a child can comprehend both fiction and nonfiction passages of 100 to 700 words.

The state says it may audit student portfolios to make sure illiterate students aren't being passed along. School principals and administrators say privately that they will be wary of approving too many portfolios, lest the state crack down.

Assembling portfolios for hundreds of students would be time-consuming for teachers trying to finish the school year.

At Fort Lauderdale's Meadowbrook Elementary, 28 percent of third-graders scored at Level 1 of the FCAT, and principal Donna McCann is concerned. ''It's going to be very, very cumbersome,'' she said.