For the next several weeks, students across Florida will be sitting for the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test one last time. Florida gets a new standardized test next year.
As the FCAT dies, StateImpact Florida’s Sammy Mack has this remembrance of the controversial test.FCAT was born in 1995 in the humid June of a Tallahassee summer. It was meant to give local school districts more control over their own curriculum, with the understanding that now - they’d be more accountable for how they spent state money.
Information about what his students already knew and what they still needed to learn, says former elementary school teacher Andy Ford.
"It gave me information as a classroom teacher", said Ford.
Today Ford is president of the Florida Education Association—the umbrella organization for the state’s teachers unions. Eventually, he and the FEA would become outspoken rivals of FCAT.
"Unfortunately it was used as a political football to be the decision maker for every decision everybody wanted to tie to a test", Ford said.
"At the time you really felt threatened if you don’t buy into the whole fcat business. It was like you were being disloyal", said ReLeah Cossett Lent.
Lent was part of the early chorus of FCAT opponents. When the test started, she was teaching English in Bay County, Florida. She remembers when FCAT test booklets were first delivered to her classroom.
"You open them up and its just a horrible, long, boring passages with all of these multiple choice questions", Lent said. "So I just took them all and put them in my closet. And my closet in my room was just full from bottom to top of all these test booklets because I didn’t use them. I was happy to leave that."
Because of her bad blood with FCAT, Lent went on to become a full-time education consultant, activist, and the author of 9 books. From the beginning, FCAT and its twin, Sunshine State Standards, were inseparable. The standards outlined what Florida schoolchildren should know by the end of the year and FCAT was there to test them on it.
The turning point in FCAT’s rise to power came in 1999 when Governor Jeb Bush tied the FCAT scores to school grades. In short order, those grades helped determine funding, whether or not a student got to go on to the next grade, and if the state needed to intervene with schools that were failing. And FCAT’s relationship with students - was complicated.
Ryan Pham graduated in 2008 and now working in marketing in Atlanta. He didn’t love FCAT but they did share a moment once, in elementary school in Opa-Locka - over the reading comprehension section:
"I loved the Box Car Kids", Pham said. "I remember opening the test using my number 2 pencil to break the seal and my excitement reading this box car kids passage."
A couple years ago, Bryan Vaughn, a student at Spruce Creek High school in Port Orange, had been up all night working on an English paper. The next day, he had to take his tenth grade FCAT. He finished early, and fell asleep.
"And about an hour and a half later I woke up to an empty room", Vaughn said. "With my head on the desk and half of the lights were on. And the proctor was gone."
Vaughn passed, and he’s a senior now. But he sees that interaction with FCAT as a metaphor.
"We let our students fall asleep in boring environments with high stakes testing", Vaughn said.
FCAT will be survived by a new test, one for the new Common Core standards. But that one’s not ready yet, which is a huge concern for teachers and superintendents. Like Miami-Dade’s Alberto Carvalho.
"With the death of the FCAT, it’s one of those, ‘I didn’t like you but I miss you, almost.’ Because what’s about to come may not be as clear as what the FCAT was", Carvalho said.
Even though FCAT came into this world before he was governor, Jeb Bush is widely viewed as its surrogate father - FCAT ascended to power on his watch. When StateImpact Florida spoke to Bush a year-and-a-half ago, it was clear that FCAT was on its way out.
"The FCAT, the dreaded FCAT that gives all children acne and makes then nauseous during the testing period, it will be replaced with a new test that will measure competency based on new standards", said Bush.
Students in fourth, fifth, eighth, and tenth grade - and their teachers - will be paying their respects to FCAT one last time through May 2nd.
FCAT was 19 years old.