FCAT is bullshit. It's repetitious crap that doesn't promote critical or logical thinking. It also removes a well rounded education from the table because a teacher is forced to spend so much time preparing the kids for something that will have so little impact on their abilities outside of school. I can remember all kinds of routes one could take in school that were available because educators (prior to bureaucracy taking over completely) knew no two kids were alike. Different avenues were there...ready to enhance, cater to, and help a child explore paths that perhaps they weren't even aware of.
Vocational, higher learning, jobs programs, arts, ect., ect. When you rubber stamp education, you're eliminating or terribly stalling a child's potential...because there is no one set "mold" that extracts and demands the best of ALL students. It's pure fantasy.
I realize I'm in the minorty on this, but I support the FCAT. Not because I think it's super great, but because it's better than what we had before, which was nothing. As crappy as Florida schools are, they used to be so much worse. We used to have a lot of high school graduates who left school with shiny new diplomas and couldn't read. That problem has been cut way down.
Does it promote critical thinking? No.
Does it promote logical thinking? No.
What it does is force schools (and they needed to be forced) to prepare kids for the basics. The bare minimum of what we should expect from public schools. It's not like Florida schools were paragons of the teaching of critical & logical thinking skills before the FCAT. The difference is now, we can at least expect kids to have basic reading and math skills when they graduate. You could argue that's not much, and you'd be right, but it
is an improvement.
