I read today's Gainesville Sun "Speaking Out" article written by Dan Boyd, Alachua County's Superintendent of Schools. You should read it as well: Did camel riding help lower FCAT Writing scores? I applaud Mr. Boyd. Evidentally, someone in education told him the writing prompt for fourth graders was not a good one.
I served on "Bias" committees with the State of Florida Writing Committee for years. In our committees we discussed bias, prompts that were biased, etc. We were eager to toss anything that might not be relative to our Florida students, such as climbing the Alps. ( (I made that one up. I really can't remember the ones we tossed; but our committee played fair and square and thought about our children and their background knowledge in order for them to be successful in their writing.) We were not out to trick our students. We only wanted to write prompts that our students could relate to.
Sometimes, new committee members appeared demanding tougher standards based on conventions; ie, punctuation, spelling, commas, etc. I always had a strong voice to squelch the Type A personalities on that committee, urging expression because I knew conventions would kill the FCAT scores. And obviously, this year, they did.
However; in our committee work, our teams would spend hours and hours deciding if a question was biased. We looked at writing prompts and weeded out those that our Florida children could possibly fail at; like the one obviously given this year to our fourth grade writing students: Write a detailed essay about a camel ride.
I probably think this was actually a narrative prompt; but, nonetheless, what in the world do our Florida children know about riding a camel? How about riding a horse or a bull? Hey, how about riding a four-wheeler? Anything except riding a camel!
I believe the FCAT committee failed our children! They are very lucky I was not on that committee when that decision was made! This year's prompt was indeed a travesty!
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