I found this curious. My personal experience is that writing, since it requires both thought and the mechanical process of putting down thoughts grammatically on paper, is more difficult than simply reading. I have this experience monthly -- when I try to write this column. Some of you no doubt would agree that I should feel that way.
At any rate, I looked at more FCAT scores from both large and small schools around the state. And they bore out my original impression: In fact, I haven't been able to find a single middle school or high school in the state that did better at reading than writing.
I went a step further and took a sample of 26 schools in three big counties -- Miami-Dade, Broward and Pinellas. The sample was just about evenly split between middle and high schools, and I made sure that the schools from each county were divided relatively evenly among schools that received an A, B, etc.
Each of the 26 schools scored higher in writing than reading. In fact, the average gap between the "percentage (of students) meeting high standards in reading comprehension" and the "percentage meeting high standards in writing" was more than 40 points. That's a big gap, even if you believe that it's possible for kids to be significantly better writers than readers. I didn't calculate results for all the state's middle and high schools, but my colleagues and I at the magazine looked at enough results to feel confident the pattern, and a significant gap, holds true for most middle and high schools in Florida.
In some cases, the scores are grotesque: In one high school in Miami-Dade and another in Orange County, fewer than 10% of the students scored high in reading comprehension, but 85% or more scored high in writing. Those scores create an impossible picture of hallways brimming with young Hemingways, apparently gifted at expressing themselves on the page but blissfully unable to comprehend any page written by another.
In addition, the writing scores at the schools were not just higher than the reading comprehension scores; at the middle and high school levels, the writing score was consistently the highest score among the six scores the state uses to compute a school's grade.
The writing scores seemed so out of line with all the other scores, in fact, that I tweaked the analysis one step further. Using my 26-school sample, I lowered the writing score by dropping it -- not all the way to the reading comprehension score -- but simply to the next highest score (regardless of the category).
Doing that meant that at least a third of the schools in the sample fell by a letter grade. So if I'm right that the writing scores are gassy, there's a very good chance, parents, that the grade your child's school received ought to be a notch lower. Schools are getting better, but we may have even further to go than we think.
I replicated those results with some other schools randomly selected from large and small districts around the state. In fact, the middle school that my daughter will attend this fall -- a solid A school, according to the state's results -- came within a point of dropping to a B when I lowered its writing score to the next highest score.
There are some things all this means and some it doesn't, aside from illustrating the dangers of turning a journalist loose with a spreadsheet. It may mean that the state -- in order to maintain confidence in the FCAT as a good assessment tool -- needs to tweak the writing portion of the test. Either it's too easy, or it's graded too easy. Or, schools collectively have focused on teaching to it as a way to boost their overall score, and the state needs to raise the bar on what qualifies as "high standards'' in writing. (Particularly now that the SAT will soon include a writing component.)
It does not mean, however, either that accountability is a lost cause or that the FCAT is somehow bankrupt as a decent measure of achievement. Aside from the writing score, the results on the other portions of the test seemed to be fairly consistent with each other -- and to justify the strong emphasis on reading that Gov. Jeb Bush is establishing with the Just Read, Florida! program.
What it ultimately shows is that while accountability is a necessary part of improving schools, it's a tricky one. In trying to create a bar for the state's schools to jump over, the state has to create standards that aren't so far out of line with parents' and educators' perceptions that they reject the standards. If I think my child's school is an A and the state tells me it's a B, I'm likely to push to try to make it an A. If the state tells me that the school is a D, I may prefer my impression, however incorrect, to the picture painted by the standards.
Some critics of the FCAT fire at the test and the notion of accountability with the analogy that "the cow doesn't get fat by weighing it.'' Perhaps, but a better approach may be to decide how big a barbecue we want to have and then figure out how much to feed the cow to get it to that size. A good scale is part of that process.