At Indiantown Middle School in rural Martin County, many children who grew up in poverty, speaking Spanish or Kanjobal, an unwritten Mayan dialect, are earning better writing scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test than some schools in affluent communities such as Wellington and Boca Raton.

In a perfect, egalitarian world, that accomplishment would not be noteworthy. But in real-life Florida, it approaches the miraculous.

A pile of gloomy evidence suggests that despite increased spending in poorer schools and a host of reform initiatives, public schools have not become the great equalizers the American Dream promised. In a recent study, the U.S. Department of Education concluded that more than three decades of higher spending in poorer schools nationwide under the Title I program has not significantly narrowed the gap between rich and poor.

And an analysis I conducted with another reporter, William M. Hartnett, for the Dec. 16 edition of The Post demonstrated that family income was a better predictor of test scores than any other factor we examined, including class size, suspension and absentee rates, teacher experience and teacher education. We found that at schools like Indiantown Middle, where about 90 percent of its 450 students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, only 37 percent of students on average scored in the top three of five achievement levels on the FCAT. But Indiantown Middle, one of Florida’s 10 poorest middle schools, nearly doubled that percentage in 2001. Only two other schools in the state exceeded expectations in math by a greater margin.

Though the school’s reading scores fell short of the benchmark to rank it an A, Indiantown Middle is exceptional, one of the state’s best by measure of obstacles overcome. The school has helped turn students into “little miracles,” in the words of eighth-grade teacher Consuelo Macedo.

But how?

INNOVATIONS THAT WORK

Principal Debra Henderson believes there are several reasons for Indiantown’s unusual scores. She cites an innovative schedule, begun three years ago, that assigns students to only two classes a day – math and reading. Students change classrooms only once a day. All other topics – history, science, government – are folded into the two primary subjects. Ms. Henderson also mentioned the school’s small class sizes and daily curriculum meetings, where teachers discuss the school’s intensive reading lessons. In the first year of the new lesson plans, the staff returned 10 days early in the fall, to learn the best and latest teaching techniques.

Other poor schools have tried different innovations – school uniforms, military-style teaching drills, academic pep rallies. Like Indiantown Middle, many poor schools stress high expectations for their students, some making the point with doggedly optimistic names like School of Success and Smart School charter. Even so, many of the poorest schools’ test scores have remained dreadful.

Few reforms seemingly have been strong enough to beat back the dragons of disadvantage, and it does not seem that any strategy or initiative alone could cause Indiantown Middle’s exceptional scores. The school’s answers, unfortunately, are as obvious as they are elusive: strong leadership, talented teachers, supportive parents and eager students.

Though all principals praise their teachers’ dedication, few have had the opportunity, as Ms. Henderson has had, to re-staff their schools. When she took over three years ago, some teachers considered Indiantown a temporary post, leaving as soon as positions came open in the more affluent coastal schools. She persuaded the school board to let her start over. Those teachers who did not want to stay got transfers. Only the truly committed were chosen to stay.

The school’s new teachers speak of their positions in the language of a crusade, not a job. Pam Peterson-Daly said her mission is to give her students the same advantages her own children enjoy. As an eighth-grade teacher, she relies on the Sunshine State Standards for most of the year, teaching her kids surface area to equations. But after the FCAT in the spring, Ms. Peterson-Daly spends most of her time urging on her best students to college. She knows that the kids, who write business letters for their illiterate or non-English-speaking parents, will have to rely on themselves to complete the paperwork. Before they leave her classroom, she makes sure that they can fill out applications for scholarships and financial aid.

Several Indiantown students said without prompting that they love their teachers. Some compared the school’s teachers to their own parents, saying the teachers can sense from a small frown whether they are confused or frustrated. The teachers, they said, often stop to help them before they have to ask.

Many Indiantown Middle students came to the one-stoplight community from Mexico, Guatemala and Haiti. The family of Amin Halum, the school’s student government president, is from Israel. The fact that many families have given up everything – home, relatives and country – for a new start in Indiantown makes the community’s poverty less hopeless, less destructive.

Ms. Macedo, who grew up in Indiantown, said many men in town become alcoholics, frustrated that they can hardly support their families in a new country. But in most cases, the dreams that brought them to the United States are not replaced with rage and recklessness. Instead, they are carefully preserved and lovingly passed on to the children.

Many Indiantown Middle students know by age 13 that they shoulder those dreams for a whole family. Eighth-grader Sonia Selvas said she works hard so she can vindicate her mother’s sadness. Sonia’s mother left Mexico for the United States when her daughter was 5 months old, leaving her behind with grandparents. Her mother worked in the fields, sending money back to support the family.

Years later, when she had saved enough money to return for her children, Sonia did not recognize her. She said she didn’t call her “Mama” for years after that. Sonia said she knows now that her mother’s decision wasn’t abandonment. It was the opposite. “She did all this for us,” she said, “so that we would have a better life than she did.”

Many Indiantown students know that they have to succeed because failure would be unthinkable, a rejection of their parents’ sacrifices. They attend school with maturity and a sense of urgency, encouraged by loving, committed teachers. In that regard, they have an advantage over some students at far richer schools.

But not all poor areas benefit from immigrants’ drive and spirit. In other places, the poverty has become more corrosive, eating away at lives until nothing remains but defeat. Teachers in those poor neighborhoods are still looking for the reforms and innovations that will reach children and parents who have given up on everything, including school.

Until they can find a way to inspire the devotion to school that exists in Indiantown, the gap between rich and poor likely will remain stubborn, and wide.

Copyright 2002 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
January 6, 2002 Sunday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: OPINION, Pg. 1E
LENGTH: 1206 words

STORY LINKS
Main story: Study: FCAT more a measure of wealth than performance
Sidebar: Analysis measures score-wealth relationship
Sidebar: Humble roots and a thirst for learning
Sidebar: Talent, expectations push school to top

RECOGNITION FOR ‘FCAT ANALYSIS’
Winner, news feature or issue package, National Awards for Education Reporting

By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN and WILLIAM M. HARTNETT
Palm Beach Post Staff Writers

When state officials introduced the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test three years ago, they billed it as an innovative way to judge the performance of individual schools and teachers, tying millions of incentive dollars to students’ scores.

But an analysis by The Palm Beach Post shows that the FCAT might have been a better barometer of student wealth than of school quality.

From the Panhandle to the Keys, schools that serve the most affluent students have consistently received the highest scores – and a disproportionate share of millions in state recognition money.

The Post’s analysis of test scores and measures of family income at more than 2,000 elementary and middle schools graded by the state in the 2000-2001 academic year found that:

> In three years, the richer half of middle schools received 2 1/2 times as much recognition money as the poorer ones – $30.7 million compared with $11.9 million. The richer half of elementary schools received $77.2 million, while the poorer half received $40.2 million.

> Elementary schools graded A by the state three years in a row had an average of 19 percent of their students on free and reduced price lunches in 2001, compared with 90 percent at three-time D or F schools. The average for all elementary schools statewide in 2001 was about 56 percent.

> Florida’s lowest-scoring wealthy middle school – Academy School of Florida in Boca Raton – still did better in reading than the highest-scoring poor school, Miami’s Citrus Grove Middle.

Though the state spends more per student overall at poorer schools, local educators said they were disappointed, but not entirely surprised, that the bulk of FCAT incentive money under Florida’s A+ Plan has gone to affluent schools.

“The correlation between poverty and minority status and the school grade is very, very high,” said Palm Beach County Schools Superintendent Art Johnson. “And so the grade is rewarding the reality of who’s rich and who’s poor.”

State officials dismissed the poverty issue when they implemented the grading system in 1999, saying that all children can learn. The Post analysis, however, shows that poor students have not done as well on the test as their wealthier peers.

Gov. Jeb Bush, who led the push for financial incentives for successful schools and private school vouchers for children at failing schools, referred comment on The Post’s findings to his spokeswoman. Elizabeth Hirst said the state’s plan to change the way schools are graded will eliminate the disparity in the distribution of money.

The changes, to be considered by the state Board of Education on Tuesday, would still give recognition money to schools that earn an A or improve by at least one letter grade.

The new formula would still incorporate students’ one-time test scores but would reduce their weight to about half of a school’s grade. The other half would be based on the improvement of individual students from year to year. Special emphasis would be placed on improvement of the lowest-scoring students.

“By measuring learning gains, we are now not just taking into account well-off students who have always performed well, but we are focusing on poorer children within a school who may be at the lower tier . . . but who have the most potential to show learning gains,” Hirst wrote in a statement to The Post.

School superintendents in Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties agreed that the new grading system would allow them to prove some of the progress being made in poorer schools, where students start off far behind their more affluent peers.

But it is far too early to tell, they agreed, whether the new plan will give schools with many poor students a fair chance to earn recognition money.

Those extra incentive dollars are important to schools in poor communities, said Shelley Vana, president of Palm Beach County’s Classroom Teachers Association.

“It’s almost appalling to think that the schools that have the highest number of children living in poverty would be getting the smallest portion, the least dollars,” Vana said.

Schools in affluent communities can provide much more for their students, she said.

But educators emphasized that, overall, the schools with the poorest students receive more money.

Palm Beach County, for example, spent about $6,550 per student last year at South Bay’s Rosenwald Elementary, where 99 percent of students receive free or reduced-price lunches. In contrast, the district spent about $3,300 per student at Acreage Pines Elementary in Loxahatchee, where only 15 percent of students participate in the lunch program.

Still, the FCAT-based incentives are far more than symbolic: The state has spent about $185 million on them in the past three years.

IS FCAT BEING MISUSED?

The stark difference in test scores between rich and poor schools raises difficult questions about how to fairly measure school quality.

Several school superintendents told The Post that the FCAT, which was designed to gauge student performance, has been misused as a way to measure teaching ability.

The statute that created the Florida School Recognition Program described standardized test performance as a way to identify “outstanding faculty and staff in highly productive schools.”

The problem with that premise, some educators say, is that the best teacher in the poorest school may not get better results than the worst teacher in the richest, Vana said.

“There is still a belief out there that if you take that faculty from an A school to a D or F school everything would be fine,” she said. “But they would face the same challenges.”

Indeed, many studies of state test scores have found that affluent students tend to do well, no matter where they go to school.

The Post performed a statistical analysis that shows up to 68 percent of the difference in individual school’s scores can be attributed to poverty alone – much more than 10 other factors, including class size, per-pupil expenditure, and teacher education and experience.

Alfie Kohn, author of the book Schools our Children Deserve and perhaps the country’s most outspoken opponent of high-stakes standardized testing, said that The Post’s findings indicate the FCAT is not a measure of school quality at all.

Instead, Kohn said, state standardized tests are “an exquisitely accurate measure of the size of the houses near a school.”

“When I speak around the country on fairness and funding issues attached to the current testing mania, I typically cite Florida as a cautionary tale of what thoughtful educators should resist,” he said.

State Sen. Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie, said that the FCAT has helped schools find failing students in need of special attention.

“Is the system perfect? Absolutely not,” Pruitt said. “Do we have a long way to go to make it more equitable and fair for everyone? Yes we do. But this was never intended to be the sole barometer of school success and failure.”

Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie school officials take poverty and other demographic factors into account when analyzing their own statistics. And Orange County sends home an annual report to parents that describes how their child’s school did compared to others that serve students of comparable wealth.

Viewed on their own, FCAT letter grades encourage a simplistic approach to evaluating schools that can mislead parents into believing that poor schools are bad schools, said Orange County Superintendent Ronald Blocker.

“Parents in poor areas of town get tired of hearing negative messages,” he said. “There could be some really dynamic things going on in that school that were not reflected in the School Accountability Program.”

The Post’s statistical analysis compares local schools’ test scores to those with similar economic profiles across all of Florida.

The result: Some D schools are performing much better than The Post’s statistical model predicts, and some A schools are not doing as well as they appear.

For example, Calusa Elementary in Boca Raton did worse in both reading and math than most schools in the state with the same percentage (34 percent) of students on free or reduced-price lunches. Yet the school received an A.

State officials, however, say they have no interest in comparing test scores to poverty because it creates a separate set of expectations for rich and poor students. All children can learn, Bush contends, so they all should be held to the same high standards – anything less is “misguided compassion” that smacks of defeatism and breeds failure.

When FCAT scores were released in May, Education Commissioner Charlie Crist singled out improvement at the 14 schools that increased their grade from D to A.

“Socioeconomic status is not a factor in a child’s ability to learn,” Crist said. “This data puts that myth to rest.”

Crist failed to mention that more than 200 D schools remained a D. The state’s D schools averaged 87 percent of their students on free or reduced-price lunch.

Richard Hughes, principal of Highland Elementary in Lake Worth, doesn’t have much patience for state officials who dismiss the obstacles faced by students and teachers at his school.

“Socioeconomic status makes a big difference. To ignore that is foolish. . . . The FCAT is a joke,” Hughes said.

About 56 percent of Highland fourth-graders scored in the top three FCAT achievement levels in reading this year, a remarkable rate considering their backgrounds, he said.

When describing the advantages that affluent students have over Highland kids, Hughes doesn’t bother with the trimmings – museum trips, fancy preschools, college-educated parents.

He lists the basics: “Clothes. Food. Shelter.”

“We’ve got kids who get two meals a day – free breakfast and free lunch,” Hughes said. “We’ve got students who don’t have enough beds at home, so they sleep on the floor.”

Hughes doesn’t believe his kids are doomed to low scores – he has proved his school can rank among the state’s best.

In 2000, Highland Elementary improved from a D to an A. With nine out 10 of its students on free or reduced-price lunch and nearly all from non-English speaking homes, the Lake Worth school was visited by reporters and lauded as a testament to possibility.

Highland dropped to a C this year.

The school’s dedicated teachers are still working long hours, and students are still making two years’ worth of progress in one year’s time, Hughes said. Indeed, according to The Post’s analysis, Highland is still doing better in reading than most schools with comparable student wealth across the state.

But its math score dropped slightly, disqualifying it from another A.

This year, there was no school recognition money. And Hughes doesn’t expect much from the proposed grading system that will be discussed Tuesday, either.

“It will fall short,” he predicted.

DEMAND FOR NEW SYSTEM

Every lawmaker and educator interviewed by The Post agreed there is a need for a new grading system and believes that the state’s proposal is an improvement.

However, most said that it leaves much to be done.

Pruitt said he supports a more flexible “sliding scale” to acknowledge that D schools face greater challenges than the perennial A schools.

“I don’t want to take anything away from a school that earns an A,” he said. “But a school that goes from a D to a B deserves far more recognition and reward than a school that goes from a B to an A.”

The accountability system that Superintendent Johnson envisions would set a series of performance benchmarks. Individual schools would either meet the standards or fall short. No degrees of success or failure. Just yes or no.

“If the goal here is to get everybody up to a standard, than let’s figure out what that standard is and get everybody up to it,” he said.

As long as the state’s accountability system ignores poverty, local superintendents said, they will continue performing their own calculations. Analyzing factors such as family income is essential to sound policy making, Johnson said: “Otherwise, you’re making blind decisions.”

Department of Education spokeswoman JoAnn Carrin said the state has not studied whether the new grading system will perpetuate inequalities in the distribution of reward money, or how it could change school grades.

“Of course, we haven’t seen the results (of the proposed grading system) . . . but we do believe it will level the playing field,” Carrin said. “I think it is like the nirvana of school accountability.”

Copyright 2001 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
December 16, 2001 Sunday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION, Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 3262 words

Every fall, the third-graders at Crystal Lake Elementary School in Martin County and public schools across Florida begin a rite of passage familiar to their parents and grandparents: Carefully, methodically, often a little wobbly at first, they train their hands in the smooth strokes of cursive handwriting, leaving behind the juvenile starts and stops of print.

Assistant Principal Larry Green wonders whether someone should put a stop to that.

Homes and offices are now dominated by the clatter of computer keys, not the scratch of pencil on paper. Why, then, Green asks, are schools still devoting precious instructional time to two different kids of handwriting?

Ray Parrish, the principal of Martin County’s Spectrum Junior/Senior High and former principal of Warfield Elementary School in Indiantown, agrees with Green that cursive is a “dinosaur,” virtually useless to a new generation of students. Print, he argues, is the neat, utilitarian language of official documents, job applications, books and computer screens.

“Cursive is one of those curriculum items that has been in the system for so long, that we have always made the assumption that it’s still needed,” Parrish said. “It’s not.”

Educators agree that the new millennium’s students will not likely grow up to consider writing by hand as old-fashioned as churning butter or weaving cloth by hand. But it also is unlikely, they say, that today’s students will spend much time folding flowery cursive notes into envelopes.

Though teachers, administrators and scholars disagree about how much and what type of handwriting instruction is best for today’s children, many are modifying traditional techniques to teach a generation of students who are often able to peck out an e-mail before they can write every letter of the alphabet.

Parrish has protested the dedication of classroom time to cursive handwriting for more than a decade.

As principal of Warfield Elementary, he de-emphasized cursive so teachers would have more time to cover keyboarding skills and basics like math, reading and science. The traditional system of teaching print in kindergarten and cursive in the third grade, he said, has survived as long as it has only because it has become a symbol of a disciplined, well-trained mind.

NOBODY WANTS TO QUESTION IT

“It’s like Mom and apple pie. Nobody wants to question it,” Parrish said. “Some people seem to think that we will bring about the moral decay of society by not joining letters.”

Both Parrish and Green stress that children must learn to sign their names, recognize cursive letters and print legibly. But in a time when teachers are increasingly pressed for time, they believe penmanship should be the last priority.

“We are constantly adding to the curriculum,” Parrish said. “But we never take anything out.”

As long as the Sunshine State Standards, Florida’s statewide curriculum guidelines for public schools, require teachers to tutor students in cursive, Parrish and Green do not expect a revolution in handwriting instruction. Green said his opinions on cursive are entirely personal – as long as the state guidelines remain the same, teachers at Crystal Lake Elementary and across the state will continue teaching cursive.

But in some ways, handwriting instruction already has evolved to match the views of Parrish and Green.

Dianne Pierce, the Martin County School District’s director of school improvement and curriculum/testing, said she has noticed the gradual change.

“When I started teaching 30 years ago, some teachers used to make kids stay in from recess because they didn’t quite form their letters right,” she said.

That doesn’t happen anymore.

“We need to teach (students) much more than being able to copy what someone else has written. They need to be able to generate composition. That is what is important to the people of today,” Pierce said.

Susan Lyle, assistant principal at C.A. Moore Elementary School in Port St. Lucie, said her teachers require that students write legibly, but stress the creativity and continuity of students’ writing over its appearance.

Because many of the young students’ pencils cannot keep up with their thoughts, the school bought a classroom set of 30 typing machines.

The AlphaSmart machines, which sell for about $300, are bare-bones computers, stripped down to a keyboard, word processing program and enough memory to display a few sentences at a time.

“Children that perhaps would be having a really difficult time writing two and three sentences can (type) several paragraphs,” Lyle said.

She hopes eventually to have at least five machines in every room.

BACK TO THE FUTURE?

Though almost all educators agree that the substance of students’ writing is more important than the style, not everybody has been swept up in the electronic current.

Robin Burnett, a second-grade teacher at Boca Raton Christian School, said her students love to learn cursive because she emphasizes to them that it is still important – and fun to write with pen and paper.

During each day’s 20-minute handwriting lesson, she plays classical music to help transform her students from abrupt, halting printers to fluid cursive maestros.

For an introduction to cursive, she covers their desktops with a film of shaving cream, allowing them to practice drawing letters with their fingers.

If her students pass a competency test at the end of the year – and almost all of them do – she certifies their new skill with a “cursive writer’s license,” which qualifies them to write third-grade papers in script.

Burnett said she believes it is vital for students to be able to write both by keyboard and by hand, in cursive.

Many private school administrators, not bound by the dual print-and-cursive requirement of the Sunshine State Standards, believe cursive is not a graceful antiquity, but the wave of the future. Pensacola Christian College has developed an all-cursive curriculum used by many schools in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast, as well as more than 10,000 schools nationwide and internationally.

The College’s A Beka curriculum teaches students age 4 and 5 to write exclusively in cursive.

David Frazier, academic dean of Summit Christian School in West Palm Beach, said his school adopted A Beka curriculum about three years ago, around the time it became popular among private schools in the region.

He said cursive’s connected letters train students’ eyes to move continuously from left to right across a page, helping them learn to read. The disjointed, ball-and-stick style of print, Frazier said, can foster bad habits like writing letters top-to-bottom and out of sequence.

Print, he pointed out, is a relative upstart, first introduced to classrooms in the 1920s.

“A Beka looked at what people were doing before that, and it is still working. . . . Our kindergarten, first and second-grade students are writing beautifully,” Frazier said.

Other schools, both public and private, have struck a compromise between cursive and print, using the D’Nealian method, which introduces kindergartners to a slanted form of print letters with tails, designed to ease the transition from print to cursive.

PENMANSHIP FOREVER LOST?

Despite some schools’ continued emphasis on proper cursive handwriting, students’ penmanship has deteriorated dramatically in the past decade, said Marti Palmere, a retired New Jersey teacher who has graded national high school essay tests for almost 30 years.

About 10 or 15 years ago, she said, nearly all the essays were legible. Now, she said, so many are inscrutable – at least one in 10, Palmere guesses – that some of her fellow graders spend their breaks lamenting the decline of the public education system.

Palmere’s assessment is not so dire. Computers, she said, have changed the way we write, and decreased the importance of handwritten communication.

Fred Blakey, 61, an associate history professor at the University of Florida who has read the handwriting of hundreds of historical figures and edited a collection of Civil War letters, said much will be lost with the generations who write by hand.

He said he pities the historians of the future, who will have to sift through reams of mass-produced, computer-generated material in standard-issue fonts, left to guess at the true author.

But the change, Blakey said, should be considered with some perspective: President Lincoln was horrified to discover that his Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, had note taken time to sign each bank note personally, reproducing his signature by rubber stamp.

Like Lincoln, traditionalists may have to accept that the personal touches of the past may no longer be practical, Blakey said. And while the new generation should admire the beautiful, handwritten letters of past centuries, he said, kids can be grateful they can use computers to write their own.

Staff researcher Monica Martinez contributed to this story.

Copyright 2001 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
January 2, 2001 Tuesday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION, Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 1616 words