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The Teacher Journalist

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The Teacher Jounalist by Patricia C. Behnke

I am not sure I have what it takes to be a journalist. I cannot remain detached from some of the stories I cover. I still get a tear in my eye when I listen to an emotional story, and I still feel the pain of those I interview. I want to be able to write about what I feel and not always go along with the accepted formula. Never was this fact more clear to me then when I attended a rally in downtown Tampa on Friday. The event was organized to protest the high-stakes testing taking place in Florida with the use of the Florida Comprehensive Assessement Test or FCAT. The FCAT is the assessment test given by schools to students in grades 3-10 to decide who gets promoted and who graduates. The results are used to determine the all-important school grade which can mean bonuses of up to $100 per student at "A" schools across the state. This type of testing is called high-stakes testing, and it has opponents at national, state, and local levels. A group of teachers and parents have come together, calling themselves the Florida Coalition for Assessment Reform (FCAR), to try to force the public to understand what is happening to education as a result of this testing being pushed down the throats of our students. And it only stands to become more of a nightmare with the federal government poised ready to pass Dubya's education plan called "Leave No Child Behind." Gloria Pipkin, coordinator for FCAR, said at the rally, "No child left behind? This program is designed to do just that: leave children behind." She claims that using this one test to determine passing and promotion and school merit, stands to further divide the nonstandard student from the mainstream. Pipkin and others in her group have support at the national level. The National Council of Teachers of English, in a summary position from November of 2000, stated that high-stakes testing, "fails to assess accurately students knowledge or to understand capability. Raising test scores does not improve education." The National Education Association, at their conference in June, directed its union's lobbyists to fight mandatory testing requirements at the federal level. They also support any measure that allows parents to opt their children out of taking these mandatory tests. As I stood among the crowd taking notes, recording key statements, and listening to the speeches, I found myself in tears as some of the teachers and parents took to the microphone to address the effects of the overemphasis on testing for our students and our teachers.