Ten years into the experiment with high-stakes testing, Florida legislators are rethinking the makeup and reach of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Legislators shouldn’t stop there. They should rethink the misguided philosophy that led to the FCAT as the supreme measure of a student’s achievement and a school’s worth. They should listen to Diane Ravitch. So should anyone enthralled with notions of “accountability” at the expense of genuine learning and opportunities for all.

Ravitch, a close ally of both Bush presidents and a former official in the first Bush’s Education Department, spent the past two decades developing and championing education reform by way of market forces. She is at the root of the movement for vouchers, charter schools, school choice, merit pay and high-stakes standardized testing as means to explode the old model of public schooling and replacing it with a more business-like, competitive model. She is also at the root of the movement that culminated in the No Child Left Behind law that encompassed much of that thinking when George W. Bush signed it in 2001. That thinking frames the way Florida did, or thought it did, school reform since 1999 under the leadership of Bush’s brother Jeb.

Did No Child Left Behind and its market-based fetish for “accountability” work? Did it foster better readers, better thinkers, better citizens? No. Listen to Ravitch, who has turned into the harshest critic of the policies she once inspired and helped write: “I’ve looked at the evidence and I’ve concluded they’re wrong. They’ve put us on the wrong track. I feel passionately about the improvement of public education and I don’t think any of this is going to improve public education.”

The movement for market-based education dressed itself up in the guise of improving public education. In fact, those “reform” policies undermined the public education system at virtually every turn. Charter schools may be a worthy experiment that reveals how public schools could (and should) be less rigid, less bureaucratic, quicker to adapt to changing student profiles. But by definition, charter schools bled the public school system of resources in the name of competition. Less than a fifth of charter schools live up to their promise as improvements over more traditional public schools. The overwhelming majority of charter schools do not. The effect on education as a whole is a double-barreled decline — in resources for public schools, in quality education overall. Lucky few aside, students are cheated either way.

Ravitch’s indictments are precise down to the damage (and deceptions) of high-stakes tests like the FCAT: “The basic strategy is measuring and punishing,” she says of those tests. “And it turns out as a result of putting so much emphasis on the test scores, there’s a lot of cheating going on, there’s a lot of gaming the system. Instead of raising standards it’s actually lowered standards because many states have ‘dumbed down’ their tests or changed the scoring of their tests to say that more kids are passing than actually are.”

That’s why many states, Florida among them, boast of having more than 80 percent of their students proficient in math and reading when judged by their state-based tests, only to see proficiencies fall to 30 percent or less when the same students take a national test. The integrity of tests like the FCAT was corrupted from the outset the moment monetary rewards were attached to test results. Under state pressure, school districts changed their schedules and taught to the test to maximize performance the week of the test while losing sight, literally and intellectually, of the larger purpose of education. The importance of subjects such as history and art were downgraded, since the FCAT didn’t test for history or art. Reading and math were overemphasized within the narrow and relatively dumbed-down framework of the test. Students were no longer educated broadly and deeply as much as trained to be efficient test-takers.

Don’t let the past tense fool you. Florida is still up to its Panhandle in market-based education. Schools are still seen as work-force factories rather than academies. Standardized testing still tyrannizes over all other measures of achievement. “Accountability” is still the favored buzzword, however detached schools’ dumbed-down results have become from true accountability. And public schools are still perceived as a business in the employ of business rather than as engines of opportunity in the employ of education. That will change, or should change, if public education in Florida is to regain its original purpose — so zealously subverted in the past decade — and live up to its promise first and last to educate students and make better citizens. It can’t change soon enough. If you won’t take our word for it, listen to Ravitch.

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