The Florida Department of Education recently announced that it’s releasing reading and math questions on fourth- and eighth-grade Florida Comprehensive Assessment Tests. A month ago, the DOE released questions from the 10th grade FCAT.
Notably not released was a reasonable, compassionate, common sense answer to this question: Why are you forcing high school seniors who were traumatically uprooted by Hurricane Katrina to abide by this state’s FCAT requirement for graduation?
“No FCAT passing grade, no diploma,” was the institutional answer. “No exceptions.”
In other words, these seniors – who didn’t have the benefit of taking the test in the 10th and 11th grades and may have passed comparable tests in Louisiana – had more success adjusting to a natural disaster than Florida’s bureaucracy.