Criticism
Though the system is designed to reward public schools for excellence in teaching, many educators and community members have criticized the program, claiming that the program takes funding from schools which need it most. It has also been criticized by many students and teachers because the schools put too much emphasis on the FCAT and not enough on preparing students for the real world. The parochial and private schools of excellence, recognized under federal guidelines separately from state guidelines, and proclaimed as superior by the Federal Government, in fact receive no public funds and are exempt from requiring their students to take the FCAT.
The FCAT tests have also come under fire from education groups and parents for encouraging teachers to teach students how to pass a test, rather than to teach students the fundamental material in the core subjects such as English. Another point of criticism on the FCAT is that all students of the same grade take the same test, despite the fact that different students are enrolled in different courses. To compensate for this, in many schools, teachers are directed to cover FCAT skills, regardless of what subject they are supposed to be covering.
Retired teacher and Lakeland, FL political activist Carol Castagnero has been a harsh critic of the FCAT and ran for several offices to highlight her opposition to the exam. Castagnero called the test "unconstitutional" during her 2006 campaign for Governor and stated during her 2008 Congressional campaign that "children are being terrorized with a test called FCAT."
Read more about this topic: Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)