Op-ed noticed by Education Week

The Education Week blog Curriculum Matters picked up on my op-ed that appeared in the St. Petersburg Times. It’s gratifying to see our issues getting attention! However, Curriculum Matters misunderstood one thing:

Haught, whose organization was heavily involved in the evolution fight, argues that scores from Florida’s science test, which is currently given at grades 5, 8, and 11, should also be used in determining whether students are retained in a grade and whether they graduate.

Actually, that’s not my argument. In this op-ed I was only pointing out the deficiencies in the FCAT and not advocating for using the FCAT in determing retention/promotion. It makes more sense to dump the 11th-grade FCAT and possibly replace it with end-of-course tests as advocated here. I did mention this in the op-ed, saying:

State legislators attempted to address this problem through a bill that would have eliminated the 11th-grade science FCAT and possibly replaced it with some end-of-course tests. The bill failed to gain enough support and died.

I would have liked to place greater emphasis on this point in the op-ed, but word count limitations forced me to be picky about what I wrote.

About Brandon Haught

Communications Director for Florida Citizens for Science.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.