MANATEE -- President Barack Obama’s decision to grant Florida a waiver from rigorous federal student achievement standards is being welcomed by Manatee Schools Supt. Tim McGonegal.
The waiver was granted to nine other states, too, all of which had to prove they were already implementing their own set of more rigorous standards.
“We’ve been operating under two separate systems,” McGonegal said Thursday afternoon. “This is a cleaner way to do business.”
The Obama administration announced the first round of waivers from the federal law known as No Child Left Behind at a White House ceremony Thursday morning. Once a bipartisan hope to raise education standards, it is now generally regarded as too cumbersome and draconian. The administration had said that it would grant the waivers because efforts to revise the law have become bogged down in Congress, even though members of both political parties agree that the law has problems and is in need of major changes.
McGonegal said Florida has already increased the rigor of test scoring for its standardized test, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. A new, more difficult version of the test also is about to be released. Together, McGonegal said, those two changes give Florida a “more rigorous system” than the federal standards, passed 10 years ago.
Florida’s accountability system gives schools letter grades based on not only test scores, but how well a school is able to improve the performance of students who performed poorly on tests. The NCLB standards, by contrast, focused only on how much a school improved its overall test scores. As a result, McGonegal said, “we had ‘A’ schools in Florida where probably the lowest quartile of students weren’t doing well.
“Florida’s (system) pays special attention to those students. Schools can’t just focus on its high fliers; they’ve got to focus on every student.”
Florida Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson echoed McGonegal’s comments about the benefits of Obama’s waiver. He said Florida was one of the first states to begin holding schools accountable for student performance.
“Overlaying a federal accountability system atop what was already in place and working in our state has proven to be confusing for parents and stakeholders,” he said.
Obama’s waiver means Florida and the other nine states who received it will not be penalized for failing to have 100 percent of its students proficient in reading and math by 2014.
Christine Hawes, Herald education reporter, can be reached at 941-745-7081.
Information from the Los Angeles Times was used in this story.
