FCAT Blues

The lucky Floridian children that I work with (I'm a mental health counselor) are now full on entrenched in FCAT woes. Monday begins the dreaded test upon which all of their ability and merit is based.

For those adults out there that remember taking SAT's or GRE's or other standardized tests...remember the anxiety that went with taking those tests. Now, imagine being 8 or 9 years old and taking a test of even greater significance. Further, imagine knowing that your score on this one test, which you cannot study for, dictates (solely) whether you pass or fail. Next, throw in the major hardships that come with poverty (as most of the kids I serve come from hard working, lower income families).

Many of these kids have parents who have worked their way from extreme poverty and practically nothing to struggling with head barely above water. Many make slightly too much for Medicare/Medicaid benefits but don't have jobs which provide insurance and therefore have chronic health issues that more affluent families would have easily been treated and freed from long ago. Mental health issues run rampant in lower income families to say the least due to the prolonged stress, often passed like from generation to generation.

In the end, most of the kids that take the FCAT do fine. Year after year they prove themselves and move to the next grade. But, for those that can't handle the stress of the test or the other intangible variables that are so pervasive in their lives (like their father dying in Iraq), or those that simply don't have the IQ to catapult them over these obstacles...those kids are retained...sometimes more than once (I work with two kids in the 3rd grade on their 3rd time around--can you say, "drop out". They don't fail...the system fails!

Should there be an FCAT, sure...as a test to measure along with report card grades and to assist in targeting the types of services needed to help a child do better. Not punish them, often for things they CANNOT control...which is more often than not precisely what happens.