Orange County School Board Member Took FCAT

Before I went to my first School Board training session last year where I would meet newly elected school board members, fellow board member Pat Deutschman shared that I was likely to build a special bond and friendship with these other newly elected board members, and that it would be like belonging to your own “School Board Freshmen Class”.  One of the board members from “Pat’s School Board Freshmen Class of 1998” is an excellent School Board member from Orange County, Rick Roach.

Rick Roach recently wrote about something he did this year as a Board Member that has impressed me so much.  It is monumental, extraordinary, astonishing, and magnificent.  It might be compared to a school board member taking the opportunity to go to the Moon.  Rick Roach volunteered and took the 10^th grade Math and Reading FCAT!! (a.k.a. “Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test”) I must tell you that just thinking about doing that myself gives me anxiety.

Roach shared about his experience recently to the Washington Post:

“I won’t beat around the bush. The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62%. In our system, that’s a ‘D,’ and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction…”

“It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a Bachelor of Science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate. I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities….”

Click here to read the whole Washington Post article on Rick Roach.

Click play below to listen to Roach interviewed on taking the FCAT.

I am in “aww” of Roach’s willingness to take the FCAT, and share the results.  I agree with Roach’s concerns that the FCAT, while a positive tool, should not be the end all “high stakes test” for determining whether students and teachers are successful or failures.   We have many students that have successfully passed Advanced Placement (“AP”) courses, SAT and ACT exams, yet don’t pass the FCAT.  That alone speaks volumes on the subject of FCAT should be used as a determining factor in predicting whether our students will be successful or failures!

I encourage you to read and listen more about Rick Roach’s experience taking the FCAT.

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