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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations
The Graduate School
2007
Contextualizing the FCAT in Florida:
A Spatial Investigation of Neo-Liberal
Educational Reform
Richie Kent
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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
CONTEXTUALIZING THE FCAT IN FLORIDA:
A SPATIAL INVESTIGATION OF NEO-LIBERAL EDUCATIONAL REFORM
By
RICHIE KENT
A Thesis submitted to the
Department of Geography
In partial fulfillment of the
Requirements for the degree of
Master of Science
Degree Awarded:
Spring Semester, 2007
The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Richie Kent defended on January
26th, 2007.
______________________________
Barney Warf
Professor Directing Thesis
______________________________
Jan Kodras
Committee Member
______________________________
Jonathan Leib
Committee Member
______________________________
Mark Horner
Committee Member
Approved:
__________________________________________
Victor Mesev, Chair, Department of Geography
__________________________________________
David Rasmussen, Dean
The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee
members.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF TABLES............................................................................................................. iv
LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................ v
ABSTRACT...................................................................................................................... vii
CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION........................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER II: HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF SPATIAL INEQUITY OF U.S. PUBLIC
SCHOOLS .......................................................................................................................... 8
2.1 Colonial Legacy of Education for Democracy ......................................................... 9
2.2 Shortcomings of Implementing Democratic Ideals ................................................ 11
2.3 Historical Development Inequalities of Public Education in Florida: Pre-Brown v.
Board............................................................................................................................. 13
2.4 Rejection of Explicit Segregation: Brown v. Board of Education......................... 16
2.5 Post-Brown Implicit Educational Inequalities........................................................ 18
2.6 Beginning a Historical-Geographic Contextualization of Education in Florida .... 19
2.7 Geography of Attendance Zones and School Choice ............................................. 24
2.8 Historical Conclusions............................................................................................ 26
CHAPTER III: THEORETICAL CONCERNS REGARDING THE FCAT ................... 28
3.1 FCAT Creating Market Forces ............................................................................... 31
3.2 Measuring Educational Value-Added vs. Educational Attainment ........................ 32
3.3 FCAT as Coercive Observation .............................................................................. 36
3.4 Arbitrary Extension of Neo-liberalism through Silence: Education for what Social
Purpose?........................................................................................................................ 39
3.5 Resistance to the FCAT and Other NCLB Tests .................................................... 40
3.6 Conclusions............................................................................................................. 42
CHAPTER IV: EMPERICAL INVESTIGATIONS OF FCAT SCORES....................... 45
4.1 Defining Variables .................................................................................................. 45
4.2 Spearman Correlation and PLUM Regression........................................................ 66
4.4 Results of PLUM Ordinal Logit Regression of Sample Area ................................ 67
4.5 Spearman’s Correlation using all Public Schools in Florida .................................. 69
4.6 Statistical Conclusions............................................................................................ 71
CHAPTER V: CONCLUSIONS ...................................................................................... 72
REFERENCES ................................................................................................................. 75
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ............................................................................................ 81
iii
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1 School Funding by Race in Florida (1900-1920) ................................................ 15
Table 2 School Attendance by Race (1900-1920) ............................................................ 15
Table 3 “Effectively Segregated” Schools in Selected Florida Counties ......................... 21
Table 4 Spearman’s Correlation of Sample Area ............................................................. 67
Table 5 PLUM Ordinal Regression of Sample Area ........................................................ 68
Table 6 Spearman’s Correlation for All Florida Public Schools ...................................... 69
Table 7 PLUM Ordinal Logit Regression All Florida Public Schools ............................. 70
iv
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 Study Area of Average Residential Property Values for Elementary School
Zones......................................................................................................................... 46
Figure 2 Minority Rates and FCAT School Grades for Elementary Schools in Sample
Area........................................................................................................................... 48
Figure 3 Minority Rates and FCAT School Grades State-Wide, All grade Levels.......... 49
Figure 4 Poverty Rates and FCAT School Grades for Elementary Schools in Sample Area
................................................................................................................................... 50
Figure 5 Poverty Rates and FCAT School Grades State-Wide, All grade Levels............ 51
Figure 6 Residential Property Values and FCAT School Grades for Sample Counties... 52
Figure 7 Alachua County Elementary School Attendance Zones with Average Residential
Property Values v. 2005 FCAT School Grades ........................................................ 54
Figure 8 Alachua County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Minority
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades ......................................................................... 54
Figure 9 Alachua County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Poverty
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades ......................................................................... 55
Figure 10 Bay County Elementary School Attendance Zones with Average Residential
Property Values v. 2005 FCAT School Grades ........................................................ 55
Figure 11 Bay County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Minority Rates
v. 2005 FCAT School Grades................................................................................... 56
Figure 12 Bay County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Poverty Rates
v. 2005 FCAT School Grades................................................................................... 56
Figure 13 Broward County Elementary School Attendance Zones with Average
Residential Property Values v. 2005 FCAT School Grades..................................... 57
Figure 14 Broward County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Minority
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades ......................................................................... 57
v
Figure 15 Broward County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Poverty
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades ......................................................................... 58
Figure 16 Duval County Elementary School Attendance Zones with Average Residential
Property Values v. 2005 FCAT School Grades ........................................................ 58
Figure 17 Duval County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Minority
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades ......................................................................... 59
Figure 18 Duval County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Poverty
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades ......................................................................... 59
Figure 19 Leon County Elementary School Attendance Zones with Average Residential
Property Values v. 2005 FCAT School Grades ........................................................ 60
Figure 20 Leon County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Minority
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades ......................................................................... 60
Figure 21 Leon County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Poverty Rates
v. 2005 FCAT School Grades................................................................................... 61
Figure 22 Manatee County Elementary School Attendance Zones with Average
Residential Property Values v. 2005 FCAT School Grades..................................... 61
Figure 23 Manatee County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Minority
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades ......................................................................... 62
Figure 24 Manatee County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Poverty
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades ......................................................................... 62
Figure 25 Seminole County Elementary School Attendance Zones with Average
Residential Property Values v. 2005 FCAT School Grades..................................... 63
Figure 26 Seminole County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Minority
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades ......................................................................... 63
Figure 27 Seminole County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Poverty
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades ......................................................................... 64
Figure 28 St Johns County Elementary School Attendance Zones with Average
Residential Property Values v. 2005 FCAT School Grades..................................... 64
Figure 29 St Johns County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Minority
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades ......................................................................... 65
Figure 30 St Johns County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Poverty
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades ......................................................................... 65
vi
ABSTRACT
The Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) is part of an educational
reform strategy that initiates competition and market forces among public schools in
Florida. Students take a standardized test and their scores are aggregated at the school
level, which is intended to be a normative measurement of the average “quantity” of
education that a school imparts to its students. The school grades are then tied to a
punitive system designed to create increased incentives for teachers and administrators to
provide a more rigorous education to students. The school grades do not however,
consider the impact of local demographics and socio-economics on FCAT scores. I
theorize that the educational attainment measured by the FCAT is affected by the daily
webs of interaction that extend beyond the school doors and official education. By
situating public education in Florida within the historical evolution of spatial inequality
of public education, it suggests the potential impacts of the topological relief in the
geography of education today. I performed empirical analyses, including correlations
and regressions between FCAT school grades and socio-economic variables. The results
show that FCAT school grades are significantly influenced by the socio-economic
standing of the students of a school. This geographic contextualization problematizes the
neo-liberal economic assumption that the FCAT is founded upon. The ignorance of
social, political and economic inequality, which is reflected through the public education
system, results in the failure of the FCAT to be an effective educational reform for the
improvement of public education in Florida.
vii
CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION
Power talk is conspicuously absent from schools and from educational
literature. There is no theory of power that contributes much at all to
understanding education and its importance in American Society. It
would seem that the customs and cultures of educators prohibit the mere
mention of power and censor the impulse to think seriously about it
(Nyberg 1981: 536).
Although these words were written over 25 years ago, they resonate today.
Discussions concerning educational reform largely remain outside the consideration
education as an apparatus of social reproduction. The intention of this work is to
investigate educational reform in Florida in the context of social power relations.
Central to these reform efforts is a standardized test called the Florida
Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT). The test scores of students are aggregated at
the school level, which is the scale where the central focus of the Florida's public school
reform movement lies.
The following is a critique of this education improvement strategy on a few
fronts. First, a contextualization of the FCAT reveals the historical circumstances that
are essential to consider in order to understand the problems in education today. Also, the
scale of the educational improvement strategy is examined. Consideration is given to
phenomena that affect education at scales broader than a school. In addition, it is
valuable to discuss the danger of reducing educational outputs to easily interpreted
quantifications. In short, this is an investigation of how the FCAT both reflects and
reproduces social relations in Florida.
In order to contextualize the FCAT in Florida, Chapter Two presents a brief
history of spatial inequality of public education in the United States and Florida. This
overview helps in better understanding the existing inequality in public education today.
It is also important to retrace the reasons for implementing compulsory public education
1
in the United States. Why is there a compulsory public education system in the United
States and Florida? To do this, I look at historical arguments which justified such a
massive public endeavor. A common thread throughout this educational debate is its
necessity for the longevity of democracy and equality in society. Citizens must have
essential knowledge and critical thinking skills in order to govern the governors, limit
corruption, preserve liberty, and overcome prejudice and inequality that threaten social
stability.
The reality of equal education in these terms has fallen far short of the ideals.
The United States was under apartheid conditions for hundreds of years, as people of
African descent were not considered by many white Americans to be worthy or capable
of being educated. It was even illegal in many places in the U.S. to educate slaves.
In places without slavery, schools were commonly segregated by race. In the
North and post-Civil War South, the vast majority of public schools were racially
segregated until the second half of the 20th century. Systemic inequality in the geography
of public education has deep roots.
The Supreme Court case of Brown vs. the Board of Education (1954) is important
in terms of progress towards dismantling apartheid conditions. The federal government
rejected explicit racial segregation of public schools. Many states, including Florida, had
“separate but equal” schools that arguably were not equal. The Court ruled that even if
all of the tangible dimensions at a school are equal (i.e., books, teachers’ salaries,
building facilities, etc.) there are complex intangibles that do not provide racially
segregated children with equal protection under the law; a violation of the 14th
Amendment to the United States Constitution. A school composed entirely of students
who are the victims of the apartheid legacy cannot provide an education comparable to a
school comprised of children from the socially advantaged.
After the Brown ruling, relief in the topology of educational attainment remains.
The works of Jonathon Kozol (1991, 2005), among others, are paramount in discussing
the perpetuation of spatial inequities of educational attainment. From resistance to the
implementation of Brown to the gerrymandering of school districts and attendance zones,
the post-Brown landscape of educational development exhibits chasms.
In addition to the unequal race relations that resulted from the apartheid legacy,
Hispanics are another significant minority population in Florida that need to be
2
discussed. The Hispanic population is relatively new to Florida, largely arriving in the
20th century and beyond. Their experience, although different from African Americans,
is also one of marginalization. The immigrants generally fled desperate political or
economic situations in their countries of origin, and they arrive to Florida disempowered.
The history and continuation of inequality in Florida is reflected in the public
education system. Ignorance of social inequality allows for its reproduction through
public education; the act of assigning students to schools based upon on their residential
proximity means that the broader spatial inequalities of society are reflected in the
student makeup of schools.
Inequalities in the public education system are mutually constituted with broader
spatial inequalities; economic disparities and racial barriers are both a product of and
catalyst for the production for the current geography of education. We cannot assume that
schools operate on a homogeneous plane. It is thus imperative to situate the FCAT
within the mountains and valleys of the political, social, and economic landscape that are
intertwined with the geography of public education.
After setting a historical context for the geography of inequality of public
education in Chapter Two, Chapter Three discusses the FCAT as a manifestation of neoliberal economic ideology. Neo-liberal ideology premises that competitive markets
unhindered by outside interference create incentives that lead to efficiency and high rates
of productivity. The FCAT is designed to create a more efficient education system by
using FCAT school grades as a normative comparison to create competition among
schools. Students and their families are re-envisioned as consumers of education as
school grades function like stock reports for schools.
Professionals of education
(teachers and administrators) are re-envisioned to function as producers of a commodity,
education.
Quasi-market forces are invented through the use of FCAT results through the
“School Recognition Program”.
The schools performing the best or those making
dramatic improvements receive bonuses in school funding for the following academic
year. The newly created index is designed to implement self-interested incentives similar
to those that exist in a marketplace, creating competitiveness among schools. This
competitiveness is designed to increase the overall educational “productivity” of schools.
3
The FCAT school grades are intended to be a measurement of the average
quantity of education that is imparted to students by a school.
However, socio-
economics and social empowerment are unaccounted for in this scheme, but are nonethe-less reflected in the test scores. The complex webs of interaction beyond school
doors that constitute the daily lived experiences of students, which are directly related to
socio-economic standing and social empowerment, affect educational attainment.
Therefore, the FCAT measures more than the “formal” learning experiences that occurs
in schools. Similar to the “intangible” reasons cited in the Brown v. Board ruling,
broader social phenomena of inequality affect the overall educational attainment of
children and students.
The FCAT affects, as well as reflects, the socio-economic landscape of Florida.
If the socially disempowered perform significantly more poorly on the FCAT, due to
phenomena that exist on different scales than the locality of the individual school, and
increased funding is given to the best performing schools, than the FCAT will
systematically increase the spatial inequality of public education. Also, by assuming a
homogeneous plane of educational and social equality, this normative comparison creates
an artificial sense of meritocracy, which is translated in the minds of the marginalized to
the belief that they are naturally or inevitably inferior, disempowering them further.
Another way that the FCAT affects socio-economics is through the neo-liberal
challenge to the purpose of schooling. The FCAT threatens to shift the purpose of
education away from democratic purposes of social empowerment to the instrumental
purpose of preparing students for the job market. This is not to say that schools and
teachers that focus on the empowerment of their students through education do not
prepare them to obtain jobs, but that being a citizen in a democracy is more than being a
productive worker; schools should be more than automaton factories.
The change of purpose of education comes from the FCAT as a coercive form of
observation. Rather than being a neutral observer of educational attainment of students,
it is a form of state control over the curriculum. As teachers become familiar with the
test, they are better able to prepare their students by modifying their curriculum to the
test. The FCAT thus becomes a force of curriculum control.
4
The specific subject matter of the test, science, math, English, and writing, cause
other subjects to have less priority. Geography, music, visual arts, history, and other
subjects are threatened by the increased emphasis of the test material.
Another important consideration of such a standardized test is its focus on
educational outputs rather than processes.
As a consequence, critical thinking and
creativity, or anything that cannot be defined in advance of the educational moment is
rendered not worth teaching or learning. Teachers’ autonomy over the curriculum is
increasingly minimized as a result. Education as empowerment for children through the
understanding of their particular social standing is replaced by cultural myths of
economic and political equality.
This situation creates teachers as “managed professionals.” It presumes them to
be motivated only by extrinsic rewards. Trust is no longer the foundation for teachers, as
they fill the increasingly routine role of facilitating state run curriculum and test
preparation.
The FCAT is designed to measure the educational “value added” to students, but
there is a silence on what educational value is or should be. Educational institutions do
not simply add greater or lesser quantities of knowledge when different kinds of
knowledge or understanding are considered. The FCAT is designed to appear as a
universal standard for measuring education, when it fact, it holds one of a multitude of
educational standards.
Through the representation of the FCAT as an objective measurement of universal
educational standards, and through the silence concerning what education value is or
should be, a corresponding purpose of education is inserted. As stated on The Florida
Department of Education website1 explicitly states schools need to be held accountable
so that children can be prepared for the job market. When education is re-interpreted
through a neo-liberal lens it shifts the discourse of the purpose of education away from
the preparation of citizens to challenge power in society (i.e., democracy) to the purpose
of preparing workers for labor. The FCAT becomes a mechanism that socializes the
costs of production (students as job training) while the benefits (increased productivity)
remain private.
It moves the public education system away from democratic
empowerment and towards a government subsidy for the production of skilled workers.
5
The implementation of the FCAT is not a wholesale reconstruction of public education,
but it is evident of a significant shift in the educational purpose spectrum. Denying
students, particularly those who come from marginalized places, the tools to investigate
and understand their social standing condemns them to the systemic reproduction of
social inequality.
In Chapter Four, I put the theory of the FCAT as a reflection of social inequality
to an empirical analysis. I investigate to what extent socio-economics and race are related
to FCAT school grades.
If variables that represent the socio-economic or racial
composition of the students at a school are significantly related to FCAT school grades,
this suggests that the FCAT is an equivalent standard for unequal beginnings. The
variables used are the percentage of students at a school that qualify for free or reduced
lunch, based upon their families’ income, the percentage of minority students at a school,
and the average residential property values within a school attendance zone.
Through
both correlation and regression analysis, I quantify to what extent the variation of FCAT
scores reflects the variation of socio-economic indicators. In addition, I provide maps to
illustrate the geographies of socio-economics overlaid with FCAT school grades for
several counties in Florida to better appreciate the spatiality of FCAT performance and
socio-political variables.
I also introduce the difference between the Geography of Education vs.
Geographic Education.
There has been extensive literature covering Geographic
Education, which pertains to the study of geography in schools. For instance, Dittmer
(2005) discusses which places in the world are given the most attention in schools,
revealing the framing of geographic education through the lens of “national interests”.
Nairn (2005) examines the epistemology of “field trips” in geography classes as
pertaining to teaching methodologies. Hardwick (2002) focuses on gender roles within
the field of geographic education.
These are all examples of studies pertaining to
Geographic Education. How Geography is taught in schools is an important issue, but is
distinguished from the current study, which concerns the Geography of Education.
The Geography of Education is different in that rather than focusing on the
discipline itself, it is the practice of examining the spatial configurations of schooling.
Inequities in education are not randomly strewn across space; they exist in spatial
1
http://www.firn.edu/doe/sas/fcat/aboutfcat/english/about4.html#q4
6
concentrations. Therefore, understanding where inequalities in education take place is
essential in developing strategies to improve education. This study, as an investigation of
the Geography of Education in Florida, seeks to tie the inequalities in education to other
spatial inequalities. Education takes place somewhere; and it is crucial to contextualize
education within the rich diversities of social topology.
Furthermore, the public education system in Florida is organized by a
construction of geographic boundaries. Students are assigned to schools based upon their
residence. The construction of space through school attendance zones is the mechanism
through which the geography of education reflects other geographies (i.e., the geography
of poverty).
In order to understand the political economy of power surrounding the FCAT, it is
crucial to study it in a spatial context. The logic of neo-liberal economic reform makes
sense from within its own framework and set of assumptions. However, the FCAT needs
to be examined beyond the world of neoclassical economic; it needs to be contextualized
under the specific historical and geographic conditions within which it is implemented.
7
CHAPTER II: HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF SPATIAL INEQUITY OF
U.S. PUBLIC SCHOOLS
In order to understand the implications of the FCAT, it needs to be contextualized
within the historic origins and evolution of the spatial inequalities in the public education
system. Access to, and quality of, educational attainment in the United States and
Florida has a history wrought with social and spatial inequalities.
In this chapter, I discuss the origins of public schooling in the United States both
in theory and in practice. Why was there a compulsory education system created to begin
with?
The discourse concerning the creation of a universal education system was
saturated in democratic ideals of the Enlightenment. Beginning with Thomas Jefferson,
through important educational leaders such as Horace Mann, in the Brown vs. Board of
Education (1954) decision, the purpose of education for the functioning of democracy in
society is reiterated. Education is essential to a population in the prevention of tyranny
and the over-concentration of power.
However, in practice the realization of these ideals has fallen short. Through
apartheid race relations, segregated schools, and particularly in Florida, a marginalized
immigrant population, the reality of comprehensive and equal education in the United
States has had glaring shortcomings.
Through “compulsory ignorance” laws in the
Antebellum South, which legally barred the education of slaves, as well the separate but
(un)equal schools in the North and post-Civil War South, deep chasms in educational
attainment mire the geography of education.
Brown brought paramount changes in the public education system; the federal
government declared racially segregated schools to be unlawful. The context of the
decision is important as it demonstrates the geographic chasm between the wellsupported and successful schools against those that were dismal and neglected.
8
Brown v. Board of Education was not a cure-all for the spatial inequities of
education. Rather than segregation and abysmal imbalances disappearing, they assumed
more unspoken forms; they were no longer a matter of explicit laws and policies, but that
of implicit neglect.
Resistance to the ruling and its implementation were also
widespread, demonstrating the strong remnants of the once-hegemonic apartheid
ideology.
The works of Jonathon Kozol (1991, 2005) for example, are paramount in
showing the extreme injustices in the post-Brown educational landscapes. Even in places
where desegregation was accepted, there are locales that are marginalized through more
implicit forms, such as economic changes. Marginalization in such implicit ways is less
contentious when there is no clear architect.
It is important to distinguish between two forms of segregation of schools. De
jure segregation refers to segregation that is explicitly mandated by law. This includes
school districts that are overtly divided into white and black districts.
De facto
segregation is where the broader segregation of society is reflected through the
educational system. Since student school assignment is based upon residential proximity,
segregated neighborhoods yield segregated schools. The difference between these two
types of segregation is important for the discussion in this chapter and beyond.
A discussion on “school choice” programs is also warranted. It is mechanism of
the “market” of public schools, giving “consumers” a choice. All school districts in
Florida are required by law to implement a program of school choice, but the number of
participants has been low. Therefore, I have examined various school choice programs
around the world in order to get a sense of the potential impact in Florida. School choice
programs are practiced in a multiplicity of forms; any discussions of expanding such
programs in Florida must be contextualized sufficiently.
2.1 Colonial Legacy of Education for Democracy
The British colonial government in what is now the United States provided little
public education; most schools were private religious endeavors. “Before the War of
1812 education was virtually a religious enterprise, with the exception of some
9
academies and free school societies” (Pulliam 1976: 55). Indeed, public education was
actually abhorred by some colonial leaders. The governor of the Virginia Colony put it
this way, in 1671:
But I thank God there are no free schools or printing, and I hope we shall
not have them these hundred years, for learning has brought disobedience
and heresy and sects into the world and printing has divulged them and
libels against the best government (quoted in Monroe 1940: 53).
In addition to leaving education to non-governmental religious organizations,
there were also regional differences in education. In the South, “religion was reverently
practiced by prayer and church attendance, but it did not become the dominating force of
life as in New England. There was no Puritan zeal for having every person taught to read
the Bible for himself” (Pulliam 1976: 20). These regional differences resulted in a less
developed education system in the South even prior to the Revolutionary War.
After the Revolutionary War, education became a central pillar in the quest for
establishing and maintaining the fragile democratic experiment.
The importance of an
educated population was recognized early with the belief that “national welfare and
perpetuity are dependent upon the dissemination of intelligence and that the nation itself
is responsible for the education thus necessitated” (Monroe 1940: 187). Monroe goes
further, paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson: “The only guarantee against the reversion of a
popular form of government into some form of tyranny by those entrusted with its power
is to be found in the general intelligence of the people” (Monroe 1940: 202). Education
was recognized as a defense of liberty; a way to prevent the construction of oppressive
autocratic social relations.
Although the discourse of government shifted towards democracy and the
importance of educational empowerment, Monroe claims that prior to 1830, “the control
of government remained essentially aristocratic.” The degree of democracy in society
was dependent upon “the control of education, which during the first stage was left in the
hands of the leaders, the masses evincing little interest.” After 1830, however, there was
a transition into a much more democratic form of social rule as education had come “to
be exercised by the people” (Monroe 1940: 186).
The transition from aristocracy to democracy was not universal across space. It
can be said that the varying degrees of democracy are dependent upon the people’s
10
general ability to be engaged in politics, which is largely dependent upon education.
“The period from 1812 to the Civil War was a transitional one during which educational
leaders such as Horace Mann, James G. Carter, and Henry Barnard forged the first links
in what has evolved as a free, public school system” (Pulliam 1976: 55).
The actions and beliefs of Horace Mann demonstrate importance of universal
education for the democratization of the government. 1837, he became the first Secretary
of the State Board of Education in Massachusetts. His arrival to this position included
the abandonment of his powerful post as the head of the Massachusetts Senate. He
recognized that a strong public education system, which educates the masses, is an
essential foundation of democracy (Glass 2000: 286). “[He] argued that democracy
required all citizens to govern their governors with an independence of judgment that
would be like the mountains that move the wind, rather than being subject to the whims
of whichever way the wind was blowing” (Glass 2000: 286; see Mann, 1891).
Democracy only exists to the extent to which the people demand that their leaders act. In
this view, Mann's decision to devote his life's work to advocating for strong public
education rather than leading the legislative body of Massachusetts is an appreciable
strategy.
Mann also recognized the danger posed by high rates of inequality to the stability
of a democracy. The greater the extent to which the inequities of one generation are
passed on to the next, the greater the threat to social order and stability. “Wealthy
children as well as poor should be schooled together so that aristocratic prejudices should
fade away” (Comppayre 1997, 125). The segregated schools, whether by race or class
“appeared to Mann to be treason against democracy” (ibid.).
2.2 Shortcomings of Implementing Democratic Ideals
The reality of public education has deep contradictory roots to these ideals.
“Compulsory ignorance” laws for slaves were one such glaring hypocrisy. In 1740,
South Carolina already created laws that banned the teaching of reading and writing to
slaves (Provenzo, 1986: 170). Apartheid whites knew that education was essential to
social empowerment. An educated underclass was a threat to the aristocratic social
11
order. In order to keep power over slaves, whites prohibited their education. Many other
compulsory ignorance laws were enforced, including an 1830 Louisiana mandate, which
punished the teaching of a slave how to read with a one year jail sentence (Provenzo
1986: 170; see Miller 1982: 212). These standards were so widespread that just prior to
the Civil War, no Southern state permitted the education of slaves (Provenzo 1986: 171;
see also Sowell 1981: 187).
The first legal precedent for racially segregated public schools in the U.S. comes
from Boston. Roberts v. the City of Boston (1849) was the first ruling in the country that
provided a legal basis for racially segregated schools (Tomberline 1967). In the South,
this was not yet a legal issue as it was illegal to educate slaves altogether.
In the years after the Civil War, nearly all schools in the country were racially
segregated. Slavery was abolished and the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of
the United States (1867) declared equal rights and protection under the law for all
citizens regardless of race. Nonetheless, racially segregated schools were maintained for
nearly ninety more years. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the US Supreme Court declared
that racially segregated but “equal” facilities were constitutional. As long as schools
were provided with equivalent resources, school districts were allowed to run racially
segregated schools. Even though slavery was abolished, apartheid remained.
Plessy was taken a step further in Cummings v. Richmond County Board of
Education (1899), when the Court declared that a school board in Georgia was within its
legal bounds to shut down a black high school while continuing to operate a white school
(Provenzo: 1986: 171-2; see also Miller 1982: 213).
“Separate but equal” was clearly not equal. In the U.S. in 1912, three times more
money was spent on education for each white student than per black student. Black
classes were generally larger, with less educated teachers (Provenzo 1986: 174; see
Sowell 1981: 214).
Literacy rates reflected differences in access to quality education. In 1870, 79.9%
of minorities were illiterate, while 11.5% of whites were. By 1900, 45.5% of minorities
were illiterate, with 6.2% of whites unable to read. Illiteracy rates in 1920 was 23.0% for
minorities and four percent for whites, while 1940 they were 11.5% for minorities and
two percent for whites. In 1952, two years before Brown, the illiteracy rates were 10.2%
and 1.8% for minorities and whites, respectively (Tyack 1967).
12
Racial segregation was standard in Florida as well as the broader United States.
In order to further contextualize the FCAT, some more detail specific the historical
development of public education in Florida is warranted.
2.3 Historical Development Inequalities of Public Education in Florida: Pre-Brown
v. Board
Prior to becoming a state, the Florida Territory passed early legislative initiatives
for the founding of a public education system. In 1832, a law was passed that partitioned
every sixteenth section of land to be reserved for educational purposes (Berk 2005, 3).
Florida remained sparsely populated, with most population living in rural areas between
the Apalachicola and Suwannee Rivers, with additional moderate populations in
Pensacola and St. Augustine (ibid; see also Paisley 1989).
Education was prohibited to blacks under slavery. Poor whites were meagerly
educated in “religious sponsored schools, and the well-to-do, who could afford the tuition
[attended] private academies” (Chipman 1971, x).
By 1840, the public school system in Florida remained scanty. There were only
732 students out of a school-age white population of 9,303 (Pyburn 1951). The public
schools in these initial years were locally funded. There was not a universal, state
coordinated system until 1927, when the state legislature created a common school fund
(Pyburn 1951, p. iii).
With no education of blacks in antebellum Florida, the occupation of post-Civil
War Florida by the North brought an interesting window of legislation. The Freedman’s
Bureau and the “carpetbaggers” oversaw the re-writing of the Florida constitution in
1868. These outsiders imposed ideas of equality on a population that were far more
radical than imaginable by white Southerners. “It is the paramount duty of the state to
make amply provision for the education of all children residing within its borders,
without distinction or preference” (Tomberlin 1967). In 1873, the Florida Legislature
passed a similar “Civil Rights Law,” which called for equal protection under the law
regardless of race. These laws were largely ignored, and there were very few integrated
schools during Reconstruction (ibid).
13
In 1876, the Democratic Party was re-elected, which was the party in power in the
South prior to the Civil War. All of the civil rights laws passed in Reconstruction were
ignored. In 1884, for instance, the state legislature created two all-black schools, in
direct defiance of the existing laws (Tomberlin 1967).
A third constitution for Florida was written and passed in 1885.
The
superintendent of Alachua County schools, William Sheats, called for “separate and
equal public schools” and argued for a proactive prevention of mixed schools (Tomberlin
1967 see Section 12 Florida Constitution; Constitutional Convention of the State of
Florida 1885, 86). In 1895, the legislature passed a law stating that “it shall be a penal
offense for any individual, corporation, or association to conduct within this state any
school of any grade, public, private or parochial wherein white persons and negroes shall
be instructed or boarded within the same building, or taught at the same time by the same
teacher.” The penalty for violation was a fine of $150 to $500 or a jail sentence of three
to six months (Tomberlin 1967, 10). This legislation was backed up a year later by the
U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Furguson.
“Separate and equal” was not equal in Florida. In 1929, the Florida Educational
Survey Committee concluded that “Negro schools of the state as a whole are by no means
a credit to the state. The training of the present teacher in the Negro schools in Florida
would not equal the average of… a first-class eighth grade. Thirty-one out of sixty-four
counties with Negro schools had terms of less than five months, twenty-two had terms of
not more than eighty days” (Official Report 1929, 47).
The gaps in funding per student also exhibited inequality. The Biennial Report
of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (Tallahassee, 1922, 12-21), which was led by
William Sheats, provided the data in Table 1 (cited in Mitchell 1970, 44). Black schools
were much less funded than white ones. In 1900, there was $5.71 in funding per white
child of school age while there was only $1.97 in the same year per black child. In 1920,
the gap grew to $34.06 in funding per white child of school age and $6.75 per black
child. Furthermore, if we divide the value of school funding per student by the value of
funding daily average attendance, we can see the average attendance for blacks and
whites for the different years. The inequality of funding of segregated schools is clear.
From this data, we can see that not only were black schools funded less, but
proportionately less black school age children went to school than whites (see table
14
2).There is also evidence of inequities in the higher education system in Florida. After
the Civil War, black students wishing to pursue post-high school education went to the
Florida Agriculture and Mechanical University (FAMU). The average funding per year
from the legislature was $7,600 per year (Kujovich 1994).
Table 1 School Funding by Race in Florida (1900-1920)
School
Funding Per
Child
School
Funding Per
Attendance
1900
1910
1920
White
$5.71
$11.83
$34.06
Black
$1.97
$3.26
$6.75
White
$11.52
$23.45
$54.69
$6.91
$13.31
Black
$4.65
(Mitchell 1970: 44)
Table 2 School Attendance by Race (1900-1920)
1900
1910
1920
White
49.6%
50.4%
62.3%
Black
42.2%
47.2%
50.7%
(Derived from Mitchell 1970: 44)
As late as 1949, the Supreme Court of Florida reinforced segregated schools.
When Virgil Hawkins attempted to desegregate Florida’s law schools, he was denied
admission by the University of Florida. He appealed to the Florida Board of Regents and
later to the Florida Supreme Court. The Chief Justice at the time, Glenn Terrell, wrote
that segregation was natural: “When God created man, he created each race to his own
continent according to color – Europe to the white man, Africa to the black man, and
America to the red man” (Selkow 1962).
The Supreme Court of Florida is quite
exemplary of the deep racism that created unequal access to education.
15
The educational inequalities created from the apartheid conditions and racially
segregated schools generated deep chasms in the geography of educational attainment in
Florida and the United States. It is important to contextualize discussions of education
today in the social construction of inequitable race relations. Segregation was explicitly
mandated across the United States and Florida until the landmark Supreme Court ruling
of Brown v. the Board of Education (1954), which declared racially segregated schools to
be unconstitutional.
However, laws mandating the segregation of Florida’s public
schools stayed in the Florida Statutes until 1961 and the implementation of Brown was
vague.
2.4 Rejection of Explicit Segregation: Brown v. Board of Education
The Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) reads as
follows:
Segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State
solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring
such segregation, denies to Negro children the equal protection of the laws
guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment-even though the physical
facilities and other “tangible” factors of white and Negro schools may be
equal (347 U.S. 483 1954).
In the opinion written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the court ruled that even
though physical facilities such as buildings, books, supplies, and less tangible things such
as teachers’ salaries and student teacher ratios may be equal, it does not mean that the
14th Amendment’s equal protection clause is being met.
The importance of education is reiterated in Warren’s opinion.
Citing
compulsory attendance laws and the great investment in public schooling, public schools
are the “foundation of good citizenship,” while recognizing education’s “importance… to
our democratic society.” He concluded that it is “doubtful that any child may reasonably
be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education” (347 U.S.
483 1954).
Inequality in public schools in a material sense was not the key issue. Warren
refers to the ruling of Sweatt v. Painter (1950), which determined that segregated law
schools could not provide blacks with an education equal to that of whites because of
16
“those qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for
greatness in a law school” (ibid). Similar results were found in McLaurin v. Oklahoma
State Regents (1950), where the court ruled that a black student admitted to a white
graduate school must be treated equally because of “his ability to study, to engage in
discussions and exchange views with other students, and, in general, to learn his
profession” (Warren citing McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents).
The separation created by racially segregated schools “generates a feeling of
inferiority” to the oppressed community that “may affect their hearts and minds in a way
unlikely ever to be undone” (347 U.S. 483: 1954). The Supreme Court ruled that if
public education is provided in a segregated manner, even with material equivalence,
there are non-tangible, immeasurable consequences that violate the equal protection
clause of the 14th Amendment.
Segregated schools serve to reinforce the socially
constructed race relations in which, inequality is manifested.
With Brown as a precedent, other court rulings took desegregation further. In
Swann v. Charlotte-Mechlenburg Board of Education (1971), the court ruled that a de
facto segregation that remained in the Charlotte-Mechlenburg School District was
unconstitutional. As mentioned before, de facto segregation is not the result of explicitly
dictated segregation, but rather is the result of school attendance boundaries constructed
from residential proximity.
Where there are segregated neighborhoods there are
segregated schools.
This ruling declared that integration must occur at the district wide level.
Although the Brown ruling was primarily about de jure, or by law segregation, the
reasons for the unconstitutionality of de jure segregation applied to de facto segregation
as well.
The rulings hinged not upon the inequalities in the physical facilities of
segregated schools, but on immeasurable affects of isolating marginalized children from
the benefactors of inequitable social relations.
In 1977, the Columbus City School District in Ohio was ruled by the U.S. District
Court to be “willfully operating under segregative conditions” because of “attendancezone gerrymandering, attendance-zone discontiguities, and optional attendance zones…
designed to preserve a system of racially imbalanced schools” (Woodall et al. 1980: 413).
The judge in the case defined schools that were “racially identifiable” as those that varied
by 15% in the racial composition of the students at a particular school from that of the
17
district as a whole. In 1977, 32% of elementary students in Columbus were black, so any
school that had less than 17% or greater than 47% black students were considered not
integrated sufficiently.
2.5 Post-Brown Implicit Educational Inequalities
Since the Brown v. Board of Education decision, great inequities remain in the
educational landscape. The apartheid legacy and the resistance to the implementation of
Brown, along with more recent shifts in the political economy, left sharp relief in the
topology of educational attainment.
Insubordination to the Brown case and subsequent rulings to desegregate was
strong. For instance, in September, 1957 black students were first admitted to Central
High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. On the first day of school, nearly 1,000 white
supremacists protested at the high school. In order to “maintain order,” the governor
ordered the Arkansas National Guard to deploy and sent the students home. The next
day, President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent in the 101st
Airborne Division to protect the students’ entry (Provenzo 1986, 177).
White attitudes against integration were prominent even in Central Florida. In a
study concerning Winter Park, a suburb of Orlando, Greenfield (1961) determined that
even though about half of the population was born in the North, there was still
considerable resistance to school integration.
“The Parent group in Winter Park is
considerably more opposed to desegregation than one might hypothesize on the basis of
knowledge of their backgrounds” (Greenfield 1961, 41).
The resistance to court-ordered integration was not limited to the South. In 1974,
South Boston’s district was ordered to desegregate.
The Irish “Southies” opposed
integration with fervor. “The Massachusetts National Guard, ordered to protect bused
students, was attacked by mobs. Racial hatred manifested itself with gangs of black and
white youths beating up innocent people” (Provenzo 1986: 178). They claimed that they
were left to “deal” with integration while the more affluent neighborhoods were exempt
from integration. “For the Southies integration meant students had to be bused across
18
town, traditions and values had to be changed, and ways of looking and understanding
the world had to be redefined” (ibid.).
The various controversies surrounding the implementation of desegregation of
schools in compliance with the Brown ruling is indicative of how deeply race relations
are ingrained into society. As the courts were ruling against schools that exemplified the
broader segregation of society, practical solutions were difficult to find. In 1975, the
high resistance to busing plans to overcome de facto segregation led Congress to pass a
bill forbidding the busing of children beyond their neighborhoods. In 1977 a survey by
the National Opinion Research Center reported that 85.3% of blacks opposed busing, but
at the same time 91.4% of blacks and 84.8% of whites surveyed thought that public
schools should be racially integrated (Provenzo 1986: 179; Chambers 1982: 1957).
Desegregation by extensive busing was not politically feasible. Where racial segregation
is written into residential landscapes, desegregating schools while maintaining school
attendance policies based upon residential proximity presents a spatial conflict. In order
to fully attack inequality in schools, we must consider a multi-dimensional contextualized
space upon which education is occurring. We must embed the geography of education
within the historic-geography of socio-economics and spatialized race relations.
2.6 Beginning a Historical-Geographic Contextualization of Education in Florida
What about de facto segregation in Florida today? In lieu of objective standards
to evaluate segregation in Florida, I compare minority composition to the composition of
the district as a whole by using the standard that the judge defined in the aforementioned
1977 case from Columbus, Ohio. To see the extent to which schools operate under de
facto segregation in Florida, I selected various counties from geographic extremes of
Florida, with moderate to high populations (Table 3, p. 21). In Broward County, for
instance, 137 of 232 public schools (57.1%) have student minority rates that are either
15% greater or less than the average minority rate of the district. This means that over
half schools are operating under what the judge in the Columbus, Ohio case ruled to be
“effective segregation”. This de facto segregation is not due to explicit mandates that
minority students be educated separately from white students, but that school segregation
19
is reflective of the neighborhood segregation.
The difficulty of implementing
desegregation that results from the segregation of neighborhoods has left this de facto
segregation largely intact.
Based upon precedence of the Brown ruling, the courts were ruling that
segregation in schools based upon broader segregation were also illegal. However, the
inability to find a viable solution after the extreme unpopularity of the busing schema led
these efforts to be largely abandoned. As evident from Table 3, Florida has a highly
segregated public education system, as defined by the 1977 Columbus City School
District case.
Segregation of minorities is not simply reflective of the legacy of slavery.
Hispanics in Florida also constitute a significant minority population that experiences
systematic socio-economic marginalization. The 2000 U.S. Census counted 2,682,715
“Hispanics or Latinos” and 233,881 Haitians living in Florida (12.5% and 1.5% of
Florida’s population; see www.census.gov). Additionally, Bovier et al. (1997) cite 1995
estimates of 350,000-450,000 illegal immigrants living in Florida.
Large influxes of immigrants come from politically turbulent places. Cuba, the
Dominican Republic, and Haiti all have had significant migration to Florida as a result of
poverty and political unrest. As a result, they arrive poor and disempowered (with the
exception of middle and upper class Cubans in the 1960s).
This is evident in the per
capita income for 1999 (www.census.gov): For whites living in Florida, it was $23,919;
for blacks, it was $12,585; and for Hispanics, it was $15,198. This income inequality
suggests that Hispanics are generally better off than blacks, but still lag far behind whites.
The socio-economic disparity is evident of the political disempowerment of the large
Hispanic minority population.
This disempowerment of minorities in Florida, including the recent immigrants, is
evident in the socio-economic disparities between them and whites. It is important to
contextualize the FCAT in terms of this unequal landscape of power.
20
Table 3 “Effectively Segregated” Schools in Selected Florida Counties
County School
District
Operationally
“Segregated”
Schools
Alachua
Bay
Broward
Duval
Leon
Manatee
Pasco
Seminole
St Johns
Total Number of
Schools
11
12
137
54
21
13
3
6
3
Percentage of De
Facto “Segregated
Schools”
22
21
232
102
26
20
32
26
25
50
57.1
59.1
52.9
80.8
67.3
9.0
23.1
12.0
(Derived from http://www.fldoe.org)
As we have seen, the de facto segregation and marginalization are not continued
by legal mandate. There are more complex and hidden ways of geographic segregation.
Kozol’s book, Savage Inequalities (1991), outlines how public schools maintained
chasms in the educational landscape in the United States. The difference this time is that
there are no longer explicit policies that create the divide.
The maintenance of inequalities in education that are explicitly dictated is less
tolerated because of the contradiction to hegemonic discourses of both democracy and
neo-liberalism. However, if segregation exists in schools because of a complicated set of
relations that extend well beyond schools and the politics of schools, and intertwine with
the very fabric of society, then they are much easier to be accepted or ignored. Kozol
examined some of the most neglected school districts in the country. In his discussion of
East St. Louis, he described some of the insidious conditions of the city:
Among the negative factors listed by the city’s health director are the
sewage running in the streets, air that has been fouled by the local plants,
the high lead levels noted in the soil, poverty, lack of education, crime,
dilapidated housing, insufficient health care, unemployment… There is no
place to have a baby in East St. Louis…The closest obstetrics service open
to the women here is seven miles away. The infant death rate is still rising
(Kozol 1991, p. 29).
21
Malnutrition is also rampant.
Kozol reported that the average daily food
expenditure in East St. Louis is $2.40 a day. Also 55 of 100 children surveyed were not
sufficiently vaccinated for polio, diphtheria, measles, and whooping cough (p. 21). The
problem of unequal access to education becomes the tip of the iceberg of inequality. It is
wrapped up in failures in services such as uncollected trash, sewage in the yards, and
little access to health care. The savage inequalities of public education are inextricably
bound up with the savage inequalities in standards of living and the geographies of
poverty, unequal access to health care and environmental racism.
Kodras (1997) shows how poverty is geographically produced. Poverty is not due
to individual aspirations or lack of personal motivation as cited by conservative
ideologues; rather, it is produced from changes in the market and the state, which
constitute the economy. Changes in the economic geography construct geographies of
poverty.
The inequalities that are produced through less apparent means than apartheid
laws are real. The football coach of East Saint Louis High describes it this way: “It’s
harder now because in those days it was a clear enemy you had to face, a man in a hood
and not a statistician… Now the choices seem like they are left to you and, if you make
the wrong choice, you are made to understand you are to blame” (Kozol 1991, p. 26).
Kozol recalls this response in from a mother in reaction to questioning the webs
of interaction that create savage inequalities among schools:
Life isn’t fair…Wealthy children also go to summer camp. All summer.
Poor kids maybe not at all. Or maybe, if they’re lucky, for two weeks.
Wealthy children have the chance to go to Europe and they have the
access to good libraries, encyclopedias, computers, better doctors, nicer
homes. Some of my neighbors send their kids to schools like Exeter and
Groton. Is government supposed to equalize these things as well? (Kozol
1991, 56)
The government, however, does not assign people to their summer camps or issue
encyclopedias, or decide who lives in which home, but it does mandate that children go
to school, and if they cannot afford private school, they must go to a public school.
“Thus the state, by requiring attendance but refusing to require equity, effectively
requires inequality” (Kozol 1991, 56). Through an unequal public education system, the
22
inequality of one generation has created an uneven educational landscape that is passed
on to the next.
The progressive ruling of Brown interpreted the Constitution to be against
segregation in schools. However, the defiance of Brown and its undermining comes with
the “clever discovery of more insidious ways in which new discriminatory stratifications
could be developed and protected” (Fennimore 2005: 1907). These new “insidious”
ways are hidden primarily in the fact that most people believe that they are not promoting
segregation policies. Segregation of quality education and other public services is more
acceptable to those who would not consider themselves racist or classist, if they are not
created by explicit measures. A thin veil over the causes of social disparity is very
effective in continuing its reproduction.
People who would not consider themselves to be racist nonetheless promote
effectively racist policies through the power of the hegemony. Antonio Gramsci (1971)
developed the idea of ideological hegemony when analyzing the rise of fascism in Italy
under Mussolini. While military power and the threat of violence was a part of coercing
people to follow the dictator, Mussolini was successful in creating a dominant view of
Italy as the “cradle of civilization,” which called upon mythologies of the Roman Empire.
Therefore, it was only “natural”, for the Italian state to rise again (Hubbard et al. 2002:
70).
Similarly, with the mythology of the United States being a “land of opportunity”
the hegemonic ideology is one of individual agency trumping social order determined by
birth.
Through this hegemonic lens, the poor are seen as those whose individual
inspiration or impetus are insufficient in realizing the assumed opportunity. This takes
attention away from systemic construction of geographies of poverty, and hides linkages
between the mutual construction of wealth with that of poverty. The social hegemony
“persuades [the] subordinate groups to accept its moral, political and cultural values as
the ‘natural’ order” (ibid. 70) which results in “subordinate people [seeming] to consent
to their own domination” (Mitchell 2000 51).
The unequal access to education is tied up with other geographies of social
disempowerment. Since which school a student attends is based upon where he/she lives,
the geographies of other inequalities in society are reflected in the compositions of
students at schools. It is now fitting to discuss the construction of school attendance
23
zones as they are the mechanism through which the contexts of various spatial
phenomena are written into the geography of Education.
2.7 Geography of Attendance Zones and School Choice
The decision making process that organizes students into specific schools is based
upon a geographic unit called school attendance zones. Students who live in a particular
attendance zone that surrounds a school will generally attend that school. De facto
segregation at schools exists because students are grouped into schools based upon the
spatial proximity of their residences.
There are geographies of poverty, access to health care, and other important
issues that affect the well-being of people, including spatial patterns of access to
education. These phenomena are not randomly distributed across space; rather, they exist
in distinct spatial patterns.
Since there are spatial patterns to race, poverty, social
empowerment, etc., public school attendance assignment based upon geographic zones
necessarily reflect the geographies of such phenomena; unless there is a conscious effort
to create zones that cut across spatially concentrated inequalities (Strait 2001; Smith
1982).
One solution proposed to these problems with school attendance zones is school
choice. School choice is designed to provide options to students and their families to
overcome the geographically determined school attendance policies. It is an essential
tool for the implementation of the educational reforms derived from a neo-liberal
economic view that will be discussed in the next chapter. However, there is a concern
that school choice programs can lead to increased segregation of schools. I now discuss
the school specific mechanisms of school choice in Florida, as well as examples from
other places.
In 1996, the Florida legislature adapted a law stating that every school district in
Florida must develop options for school choice. The K-20 Education Code of the Florida
State Statute (Title XLVIII, Chapter 1002.31), “Public School Parental Choice,” states
that each school district (in Florida, each county) must provide for a “controlled open
enrollment” system. In addition to the commitment that “no controlled open enrollment
24
plan that conflicts with federal desegregation orders shall be implemented,” the statute
mandates that such a system be based upon parental preference. After matching siblings
in schools, a lottery system is established, given that “the procedures maintain
socioeconomic, demographic, and racial balance” (ibid).
Alves and Willie (1987) discuss how controlled school choice in the U.S. is
designed to give parents a say in preference of school but can sometimes achieve
effective segregation (West 2006, 25).
West (2006) refers to Willie (2000) and
acknowledges in the study that controlled choice can “empower parents and their
children … [and] promote diversity by way of enrollment fairness guidelines that
guarantee space in all schools for all racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and other groups in
the community; and they promote school improvement by suiting the choice data as a
referendum on attractive and unattractive schools” (Willie, 2000, quoted in West 2006,
25).
While the Florida statute mandates that “socioeconomic, demographic and racial
balances” be maintained at school levels, Table 3 (p. 21) suggests that balance never
existed. As school choice in Florida has affected a small amount of students, the study of
concerns from other schools systems is warranted.
If insufficient attention is given to socio-economics, demographics, and race,
increased segregation can result. Saporito and Lareau (1999) demonstrate empirically
how white families in the U.S. prefer to go to schools with white student populations, and
generally vehemently oppose sending their children to schools with large black student
populations. Black families tend to consider racial composition less often in their choice,
while focusing more on rates of poverty.
In this context, choice increases racial
segregation given the general motivations for choice between the two racial segments.
School choice was one of the main ways that effective segregation was
maintained after Brown v. Board. Moran (2005) describes that prior to Brown the Kansas
City school district had two separate attendance zones: one for whites’ schools and the
other for blacks’. After Brown, they merged the two zonings into one, creating zones that
had mixed racial compositions. However, the district had a liberal school transfer policy
in place so that students could apply to go to a school outside of their zone. “The transfer
policy would, however, become the primary vehicle through which the White population
eluded integration” (p. 1935).
25
Research on school choice causing segregation based on cultural issues is evident
as well. For example, Denessen et al. (2005) discuss how school choice has increased
segregation of Muslim students in the Netherlands (see also Kristen, 2006 for a study of
socio-economic segregation from school choice programs in elementary schools in
Germany). Walslander and Thrupp (1995) performed a detailed empirical analysis of
school choice on socio-economic segregation in New Zealand and concluded that “socioeconomic segregation between schools has been exacerbated more than would be
predicted simply on the basis of residential segregation”.
This is not to suggest that school choice programs necessarily create segregation.
It is the extent to which, segregation is consciously anticipated that school choice can
function as an empowering machine. However, left unregulated, school choice programs
have been shown to increase segregation in schools.
In order for school choice to not increase levels of segregation, they must be
designed specifically to increase integration. “School boards think that, if they offer the
same printed information to all parents, they have made choice equally accessible. That
is not true, of course, because the printed information won’t be read, or certainly will not
be scrutinized aggressively, by parents who can’t read or who read very poorly” (Kozol
1991, 62).
2.8 Historical Conclusions
The implementation of a compulsory public education system has been intended
to empower citizens and facilitate democracy. It does this through arming citizens with
the knowledge and skills necessary to be critical of a government, so that the ‘governors
are governed,’ providing not only increased equity of society's members, but also of
increased long-term stability.
It is important to contextualize the discussion concerning education today within
this rich context. Centuries of apartheid relations gave rise to deep abysses in the
landscape of educational attainment. The disempowerment of African Americans has
been reinforced through less access to quality education. Recent Hispanic immigrants to
Florida are also in a socially marginal position. Even after Brown, and more strict
interpretations of the 14th Amendment, new hidden ways of systematic marginalization
26
of educational equality have arisen. Efforts to improve education must take conscious
consideration of the topological relief in the geography of educational attainment.
27
CHAPTER III: THEORETICAL CONCERNS REGARDING THE
FCAT
This chapter outlines some theoretical implications of the Florida Comprehensive
Assessment Test (FCAT). First, the FCAT is considered through the ideology and
accompanying lexicon of neo-liberal economics.
The test is used as a force for
educational reform that uses incentives and behaviors similar to those of actors within
free markets. The creation of competition among schools is proposed as the key to
improve education, which is based upon a normative comparison derived from the
standardized test. Just as firms must compete in the market to provide goods and services
in order to achieve profit, financial incentives are similarly assumed to motivate rigorous
educational instruction and the administration of schools.
It is important to highlight the discrepancies between neo-liberal economic ideals
and the current geography of education in Florida. The ideals through which the program
is designed are logical within their own framework of thought, but there is incongruence
between the basic assumptions of this logic and material reality. By contextualizing the
free market assumptions in the geography of education and accompanying politico-social
phenomena, it is the intention of this chapter to map out the political economy of power
behind the implementation of the FCAT.
The standardized test is part of Florida’s compliance with the “No Child Left
Behind Act” (NCLB), passed in 2001 by a majority Republican Congress under President
George W. Bush. It mandates that all states implement a standardized testing schema for
public schools. Although the FCAT was enacted prior to NCLB, all states are now
required to have a similar standardized test.
Section 3.1 discusses how the FCAT is intended to create market incentives for
teachers and administrators in order to improve education in public schools. “School
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grades,” which are aggregates of students’ scores, are designed to create a normative
comparison upon which inter-competitiveness among schools is based.
The scores
impact school funding with the “School Recognition Program.” The highest performing
schools are rewarded with funding bonuses. The “producers” of education (i.e., teachers
and administrators) are enticed to prepare their students well for the test through this
punitive system attached to the school grades. The “consumers” of education (i.e.,
students and their families) are attracted to “consume” the school that has the highest
performance.
The test is intended to measure the average amount of “education added” to the
students at a particular school. However, there is no consideration of broader geographic
inequalities which may systematically affect FCAT scores. Section 3.2 discusses how
students’ educational attainment can be affected by their daily lived experiences that
extent beyond the school walls.
The measurement recorded through the FCAT is
reflective of much more than what a student learns in their school. It is revealing of the
webs of interaction and power relations that constitute children's daily lives. Many
phenomena that exist at different scales (i.e., geographies of poverty, wealth, race, etc.)
than that of school attendance zones have the possibility of affecting the measured
educational-value added.
The FCAT also affects education within the school walls. Section 3.3 discusses
the effects of the FCAT on education in the classroom. One of the main purposes of the
FCAT is to be a force of change, not just a measurement of educational attainment from
afar. It is essential to discuss the potential consequences of the combination of the FCAT
scores and the punitive system attached to it. A potential consequence is increased state
control over curriculum, which has weight over which subjects areas are prioritized.
In addition, there is a threat to the professionalism of teachers. The infatuation
with knowing education in quantitative terms can in itself be harmful to education in the
classroom.
High stakes testing creates the potential for teacher disempowerment.
Through the neo-liberal view, teacher motivation and integrity are reduced economic
incentives and consequences. While focusing on the outputs of education as measured by
the FCAT, a serious educational consequence lies in shifting away from focusing on
learning processes.
29
The search for an objective quantification of educational value added to students
in the form of the FCAT is silent on what “educational value” is or should be. Section
3.4 investigates the consequences of reducing schools to sites of educational value
production, and the dangers of thinking about students' minds as industrially produced
commodities. However, education is not something that someone simply has a greater or
less quantity. Beyond the simplistic view of schools adding greater or lesser quantities of
education to students, there is a multiplicity of educational qualities.
This silence on what kind of educational-value is being added to students allows a
substitution for the democratic intentions that founded the compulsory public education
system. The FCAT marks a shift in emphasis in the purpose of education away from
empowering citizens towards the production of children as workers for the job market.
In the context of the historical-spatial inequality of education in the United States
and Florida, the educational landscape is one of sharp relief. The FCAT affects socioeconomics and power relations in Florida through the change in purpose of schooling and
by providing a false sense of meritocracy by ignoring existing unequal social relations.
With the substitution of the topological relief in the geography of social inequality for the
neo-liberal homogeneous plane, marginalized students are constructed as inherently
inferior. By ignoring the unequal playing ground and holding all students to the same
standard, the FCAT is a rigged game.
This is not to say that marginalized students, teachers and administrators are
powerless to overcome the reproduction of their position in the social relations of
education. As an example, I discuss the success of Irving Elementary school in Chicago,
Illinois. Teachers and administrators were successful in reforming one of the worst
schools in the district. They took a school whose children were surrounded by the kinds
of violence and poverty that would destroy the hope of any reasonable person, but
somehow, they turned it around. While acknowledging social, political, economic, etc.,
inequalities that create severe disadvantages, they provide some strategies that allow
teachers, students, and administrators to overcome the reproduction of inequality in the
geography of education.
Education, however influenced by various geographies of
power, poverty, or race relations, is not geographically determined. After all, there is
nothing geographically determinate about the production of the current unequal sociospatial relations. The way the world is today was not an inevitable consequence of some
30
preexisting spatial configuration in the past. Although it is important to examine how the
current inequalities will be reconstituted in the reproduction of society, there are
strategies than can lead to the horizontal dissemination of power.
Irving Elementary school in Chicago is one such place.
Some of the most
successful strategies of education reform are often in direct conflict with the effects of the
FCAT.
The implementation of the plan has not all happened without resistance.
Although the FCAT, as any well constructed disciplinary system, is designed to separate
the individual from his/her cohorts and confront in isolation with the breadth and strength
of the entire state all at once, demonstrating an irrefutable imbalance of power, there has
been some resistance to the it. A brief discussion of the limited resistance to the FCAT is
provided as a conclusion to this chapter.
3.1 FCAT Creating Market Forces
Since the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, there has been increased
discourse about education in terms of the market or “market justice” (Dittmer, 2004, 171;
see also Fuller and Elmore 1996; Stromquist and Monkman, 2000; Witty et al. 1998).
Neo-liberal advocates purport that the creation of market forces in public education can
foster competitiveness among public schools, which will create increased motivation and
incentives for providing more rigorous education (Chub and Moe 1990). It is argued that
if schools can be readily compared through student performance on normative test scores,
the parents students can act as informed consumers and gravitate towards schools that
perform better. It follows that teachers and administrators must compete against their
counterparts at other schools in order to retain students, theoretically providing increased
incentives to provide a more rigorous education.
In Florida, school comparisons are based upon FCAT test scores. Each year
students' FCAT scores are averaged at the school level, with each school receiving one
overall grade (“A” through “F”). All students in grades three to ten take the reading and
math sections of the test. The reading consists of a short essay followed by questions
about the readings. The math questions include arithmetic and word problems. Students
in fifth, eight, and eleventh grades take are tested in science. The science questions are
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multiple-choice and come from chemistry, physics and biology. Students in fourth,
eighth, and tenth grades take the writing test, in which multiple-choice questions are
asked about writing organization, and an essay is written.
The “School Recognition Program” is a punitive system for schools based upon
FCAT scores, which uses funding bonuses to entice administrators to emphasize students'
preparedness for the test. It provides “public recognition and financial awards to schools
that have sustained high student performance or schools that demonstrate substantial
improvement in student performance” (Florida Department of Education website). The
award consists of $100 per student bonus in funding for the following year. For example,
Deer Lake Middle School in Leon County, Florida received a bonus in funding of
$136,078 for the 2006 school year for achieving an “A” in 2005.
The “consumers” of education (students and their families) can shop around for
the school that they would like to attend with the FCAT school grade suggesting the
productivity of the schools. School choice is central to the creation of quasi-market
forces among public schools. In theory, students will flow towards schools that perform
the best, as families seek to provide the best opportunities for their children, making de
facto segregation of attendance zones irrelevant. However, as we have seen in the
previous chapter, school choice programs have the potential to lead to increased
segregation, as differing access to information and abilities to battle bureaucracy
generally result in the socially empowered taking greater advantage of school choice.
Segregation can arrive through school choice if it is not actively anticipated and
explicitly controlled.
3.2 Measuring Educational Value-Added vs. Educational Attainment
The school grades produced from aggregated student FCAT scores are designed
to represent how much educational value is added, on average, to the students of a
particular school. It is assumed that the schools that are more “efficient” at teaching their
students are the ones that receive the best scores.
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The measurement that the FCAT records does include educational value-added by
schools, but it is only one part of educational attainment observed. There are phenomena
that exist on various scales other than that of the localities of individual schools that are
integral composites of the educational attainment equation.
Family life and
expectations/encouragement, after-school programs, cultural and community values and
expectations, and socio-economic standing all are phenomena that are interlocked with
the educational attainment measured by the FCAT. Such issues are evidence of the
difference between the educational value-added by schools and the corresponding school
grades.
To illustrate this scalar fallacy, I briefly review the debate in geography in the
1980s concerning the study of localities, and which scales are appropriate to study. The
Changing Urban and Regional Systems (CURS) was an initiative designed to study how
economic restructuring was manifested in various localities around Britain (Smith 1987).
Detailed information was gathered on a plethora of variables concerning gender,
ethnicity, work culture, housing markets, social divisions of class, and others.
The study came under intense criticism for the spatial extent of the study areas.
Different localities were studied independently, with the empirical data intended to
explain how each local area (an individual city) was experiencing economic
restructuring.
However, the reasons for the changes in these locals often are only
comprehensible at scales much larger than the study area. For instance, can the deindustrialization of a city be understood by studying only the city itself or must it be
incorporated into a broader theory of global economic restructuring? If a call center
leaves Birmingham, for instance, and relocates to Delhi, India, it is impossible to
understand this Birmingham's fate by studying the locale of Birmingham alone.
Smith summed up the problem of the scalar ignorance of the localities study with
the following: “Like the blind man with a python in one hand and an elephant’s trunk in
the other, the researchers are treating all seven localities as the same animal” (1987: 63).
By ignoring inequalities in education that are inter-locked and interdependent of broader
social inequities, which are evident in test scores, the FCAT is an inadequate tool to
provide an understanding for the inequitable schooling.
The wealth and material excess that are siphoned towards wealthier sects of
society, evident in low income vs. upscale neighborhoods arise from the same acts of
33
production. Middle and upper classes are dependent upon the surplus value extraction of
lower classes. The difference in value that a cleaned office has over a dirty one is greater
than the amount of money paid to the custodians who cleaned them; cooked meals sold in
restaurants have a higher value than the sum of the raw inputs (electricity, bread, raw
meat, etc.) and the amount paid to the cook. The wealth of the restaurant owner is
derived from the surplus value extracted from the employees.
As poor and wealthy families are simultaneously produced through the same
social relations, it is impossible to understand the wealthy without understanding the poor
and vice versa. It is imperative to consider the social relations that bind the creation of
wealth and power to the creation of poverty and powerlessness. When the educational
system is viewed as a reflection of power in society, the scalar fallacy of considering
education on locales such as the individual school level is apparent.
This inadequacy of scalar considerations in the FCAT for educational reform is
connected to critiques of the effectiveness of the Brown v. Board ruling. Rogers and
Oakes (2005) note how it is impossible to create more equity of education by working
solely within the educational system itself. Effects to remedy inequality in schools by
focusing on only the school level “divert[s] attention from the inextricable connections
between separate and unequal schooling and the larger separate and unequal social,
political, and economic conditions that schooling mirrors” (p. 2180).
The educational attainment measured by the FCAT includes effects from the
everyday lived experiences of students. “The entanglement of educational equity with
cultural and political dynamics that extend outside the school make it impossible to see
equity reforms as strictly professional matters belonging to educators alone” (Rogers and
Oakes 2005, 2189).
It is rare that pedagogical effects can be traced back to any causes which
we can isolate. In complex systems, causes come in bundles and only the
presence of a whole series of conditions guarantees success. We need to
think of causal nets, in which multiple factors have reciprocal impact
(Bueler, 1998 in Wrigley 2005).
With similar high-stakes testing in the U.K., school “effectiveness” testing has
drawn similar critiques. “The attempt to isolate school and classroom effects from
contextual factors is central both to the school effectiveness research paradigm and to the
34
political demands of those who need to blame schools in poorer areas for their low
attainment” (Wrigley 2005: 94).
The detachment of education from broader social
inequalities that proposes a simplistic solution that is politically feasible under the current
dominant paradigm.
“Placing the burden on the individual to break down doors in finding better
education for a child is attractive to conservatives because it reaffirms their faith in
individual ambition and autonomy. But to ask an individual to break down doors that we
have chained and bolted in advance of his arrival is unfair” (Kozol 1995). Politicians can
be seen as caring for students who attend poor performing schools by proposing solutions
that are logical from within the dominant paradigm of society, while ignoring the root
causes and webs of interaction that are systemic of school inequality.
It is not a matter of inciting “motivation” through the creation of quasi-market
reforms; teachers and students interact, which constitute some, not all, of the connections
that composite the webs of daily interactions that reproduce the unequal landscapes of
education. To ignore the broader cultural and political inequalities in which the school
exists shows the FCAT to be an unfair mechanism that inevitably reproduces the
inequities in the existing educational landscape. As the broader inequalities are reflected
in test scores, the “School Recognition Program” punitive system is a competition with
an unequal starting ground.
In the U.K., Gillborn and Mirza (2000) analyzed school performance data. They
found that while scores overall on tests improved, the “achievement gap” between those
from working class families vs. those from professionally employed parents had widened
(see also Mortimore and Whitty 1999). For Florida, this is an investigation needing to be
done, but is too large to include in the present project.
The issue of overall improvement through the increase in standardized testing
does not necessarily mean that a school is adding more educational value to its students.
After 1999, the first year of the FCAT, there was a phenomenal increase in test scores.
There were 78 schools receiving an “F”; the following year there were four. The number
of “A” schools rose from 203 to 551.
When you see a gigantic jump like that, it's just not consistent with the
real world…If it's a legitimate system, you expect to see incremental
improvement over time, not wild jumps (Hegarty 2000 interviewing James
Popham).
35
This is evidence of the effect of the test on curriculum. The FCAT and School
Recognition Program provide incentives for preparing students to do well on the test,
which does not necessarily translate into better education. If the scores change so
drastically, one can conclude that the FCAT affects how and what teachers teach. The
constructed market rewards and consequences are potentially incongruent with strategies
to provide the most beneficial education to students.
3.3 FCAT as Coercive Observation
The measurements created by FCAT examinations do not merely assess education
added to students by schools, but are also a reflection of inequality in education. The
neo-liberal strategies are limited to affecting change at the school-wide level. This hides
both the effective teaching strategies that lie at levels smaller than the school level and
systemic inequality in society that exists on scales much larger than one school. At
question is how the choice to analyze public education at the scale of the individual
school inhibits strategies to address systemic issues of educational inequality.
Automated grading performed by machines creates the false assumption that
students are all being graded equally. An equal standard for students with unequal
opportunities is not a fair measurement. The grading system appears uncompromising,
confronting each teacher and student in isolation with the force of the entire state. This
form of surveillance has been engineered to last the entire year.
The FCAT and School Recognition Program exhibit the traits of a standard
disciplinary device. “At the heart of all disciplinary systems functions a small penal
mechanism” (Foucault 1995: 177). Included in this “penal mechanism” are punishment
for those who perform poorly (loss of students and consequent funding) and “rewards”
for those who comply (funding bonuses through the “School Recognition Program”).
The school grades are distributed “between a positive and negative pole” and the state
has worked out an “arithmetical economy based on it” (ibid). The FCAT is a “perpetual
penality that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary
institution. It compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it
normalizes” (Foucault 1995: 183).
36
The FCAT is a mix of surveillance through an observed hierarchy and the
imposition of normalized judgment upon the ordered bodies of students and teachers. It
is a “ceremony of power… the deployment of force and the establishment of truth”
(Foucault 1995, 184). It creates an absolute and irrefutable ideal of truth and knowledge;
the testable material has been assumed to be the ultimate end in educational achievement.
A truth of pertinent education material is constructed, and by design, made to appear as
the truth. This includes the decision of which subjects are essential, and which ends
should be met.
This looming watch of the examination anchors itself in the extraction of surplus
value in the political economy of power. Not only is the FCAT reflective of the broader
unequal relations of society, but it changes all relations between students and teachers by
insisting only upon outputs of learning. The fallacy of focusing solely upon outputs of
learning and ignoring processes of learning is similar to other neo-liberal economic
epistemological blunders in knowing a commodity; in that the social relations and
processes of production are ignored.
To illustrate this, consider breakfast. An egg can be known in many different
ways; whether it is white or brown, in terms of its chemical composition, as a house of
demons, or a chicken fetus. Some knowledge or “facts” of the physical reality of the egg
are clearly important. I must know it is edible, it should be cooked for safety, and it has
high levels of protein and cholesterol. This knowledge, however, does not aid in the
understanding how the egg arrived at my plate, who produced it, how its value was
created and where its value came from, which is ever-so-important if I am interested in
having eggs arrive on my plate in the future. This more critical understanding of the egg,
which goes beyond the physical “facts” of the egg, concerns the process of production.
By investigating the egg beyond its surface appearance, the egg can be critically
examined as an embodiment of social relationships. The reproduction of the egg is
intrinsically bound to the reproduction of the (unequal) social relations that led to the
egg’s production. Knowing the egg in terms of a product of social relations through a
process of production is far more valuable and appropriate knowledge than a description
of its material form, for those interested in the continual access to eggs for nutritional
sustenance. The relationships among the farmer, transporter, packager, wholesaler, and
retailer all interact, with different power relations. Egg “facts” that describe its physical,
37
chemical, nutritional, etc., composition, are not unimportant but these facts as an end to
themselves presents limited, uncritical knowledge, which is ineffectual in understanding
the egg as the material manifestation of a political economy of power. It is through an
examination of the social relations of the production of commodities that reveals power
differentials; the commodity is the construction site of inequalities.
In the production of commodities, the social relations and processes of production
are hidden in order to maintain unequal power relationships; the egg carton contains
minimal information about the relations that brought it into being. The FCAT is similarly
epistemologically blind. By focusing only on educational outputs, processes of learning,
critical thinking and creativity are not valued by the FCAT. Subsequently, the incentive
created for teachers to prepare students to perform well on the FCAT creates
disincentives for aforementioned education goals.
Curriculum in schools has become “based upon a forced separation… of process
from learning outcomes, inevitably leading to a narrowing of content to focus on product
rather than the processes of learning and thinking” (Codd 2005: 196). As a consequence
“knowledge, experience, understanding, and especially imagination, are recognized only
if they can be reduced to something observable, or to some performance outcome that can
be specified in advance of the educational moment” (Codd 2005: 201).
Since the No Child Left Behind Act (2001), the Center on Education Policy
reports that “71 percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of
instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects to open up more time for
reading and math” (Dillon 2006). This narrowing of content to adhere to the dictates of
the standardized test, along with the evaluation of teachers based upon their students’
performance on standardized tests drastically changes the role of teachers to those as
managed professionals. “Accountability” through standardized testing has “created for
teachers the illusion of more collaborative and participative ways of working while in
reality imposing increased levels of surveillance and a pervasive intensification and
deskilling of their work… Trust is no longer taken to be the foundation of professional
ethics. Teachers are assumed to be motivated by extrinsic rewards and the teaching act is
considered to be purely technical and instrument” (Codd 2005: 202).
Interestingly, the social purpose of compulsory universal education is challenged.
The echoes of Horace Mann and Thomas Jefferson concerning the necessity of an
38
informed and critically thinking populace for the facilitation of democracy and
prevention of tyranny are buried by the disciplinary FCAT panopticon.
3.4 Arbitrary Extension of Neo-liberalism through Silence: Education for what
Social Purpose?
In addition to constructing knowledge concerning a particular form of educational
attainment, the FCAT is also part of a strategy that re-shapes the fundamental purposes of
schooling. “Not only are schools to be evaluated in terms of ‘value-added’ achievement
outcomes, but individual teachers are to be appraised against standards of performance.
The effect of these moves has been to introduce into the school a set of managerial values
which are in direct contrast to traditional democratic education values” (Codd 2005:
200). This is allowed to happen through the complex quantified evaluation through the
FCAT, where “reliable statistical operations lend them the appearance of scientific
objectivity while simultaneously leaving them open to political reinterpretation”
(Wrigley 2005: 93).
The statistics produced through the FCAT are made to appear objective. However,
this reform in education has arrived with unspoken political re-interpretations of the
social purpose of public schools.
The neo-liberal ideological infiltration penetrates
beyond the level of curriculum, shifting the discourse of the purpose of education away
from facilitating democracy to one of training workers for automated jobs.
From the perspective of a democratic society, the professionalism of
teachers is based on a recognition of their right to make autonomous
judgments about how, in particular institutional and classroom contexts, to
develop their student’ capacity for democratic deliberation, critical
judgment and rational understanding. Without this kind of professional
autonomy teachers have no protection against external coercion and
pressure, and they quickly become neutral operatives implementing the
‘directives’ of their political masters and mistresses (Codd 2005: 204,
citing Carr and Harnett 1996: 195).
In contrast to developing students’ deliberation abilities, more “pragmatic”
purposes of education include preparing young citizens to fulfill the class role that they
were born into.
Kozol (1991) outlines inner-city high school programs with more
“realistic” goals, which include training for a job that they are likely to fulfill. Included
39
are courses in cosmetology which, while insulting for wealthy kids, are viewed as a
“realistic preparation for the adult roles that 16-year-old black girls may expect to fill”
(Kozol 1991: 76). The wealthy schools in the suburbs focus on preparation for college,
while the urban schools take more “practical” approaches, including the teaching of
“business math” i.e., how to use a cash register (ibid).
Under neo-liberal reform, “education is reduced to a commodity, a private rather
than a public good. The central aim of education becomes the narrow instrumental one
of preparing people for the job market” (Codd 2005: 196). On the Florida Department of
Education website, the purpose of the FCAT is stated thus: “To meet the complex
challenges of today’s workplace, students must be skilled in mathematics and science, be
able to read and understand difficult texts, and be able to write well” (FCAT purpose
website, emphasis added). The purpose of education as essential to democracy or civic
responsibility is never mentioned. It is never explicitly challenged either; rather, a new
purpose is inserted though a slight of hand.
The arbitrary extension of neo-liberalism is evident in shifts away from the
democratic ideals of compulsory education towards schools as producers of skilled labor.
This further threatens the material wellbeing of the politically marginalized, as
understanding how the political economy of power works in society is central to
changing it.
Before moving on to some statistical analysis to investigate to what extent the
FCAT reflects the socio-economics of Florida, it is important to discuss the resistance to
the FCAT and NCLB.
3.5 Resistance to the FCAT and Other NCLB Tests
There has been some resistance to the FCAT and other states’ standardized tests.
Florida State Senator Bill Smith proposed a bill during the 2006 legislative session that
would repeal the FCAT. Additionally, it would set up a committee to investigate the
effects of the FCAT on the public education system in Florida. It would specifically
examine the changes in curriculum, the affect on students with disabilities, the change in
40
graduation rates, and the effect on students who speak English as a second language
(Shah 2006).
Mary Russell is a former teacher and member of the Pinellas County School
Board who refused to allow her two children to be tested in 2003: "I disagree with the
pressure. I disagree with the funding. It isn't good for schools, and it isn't good for kids”
(Hegarty 2003). The Superintendent of Fairport, New York, William Cala, has been
trying to organize a different diploma, which does not require students to take the
standardized test in compliance with the No Child Left Behind Act (Riede 2001).
In Scarsdale, also in New York, eighth grade students organized a boycott of the
state’s standardized test. Over half of the students refused to take the test, and the
superintendent tacitly complied by treating the absent students with the normal protocol;
the unexcused absences resulted in the students being barred from making up their work
(ibid).
The “Florida Coalition for Assessment Reform” is a “grassroots not-for-profit
organization that provides resources and assistance to parents, teachers, students, and
other citizens who support constructive assessment” (http://www.fcar.info/). Clearly
stated, they term the FCAT as a:
secret, high-stakes test that cannibalizes the curriculum, penalizes poor
test-takers, diverts scarce resources, traumatizes children, shames and
stigmatizes communities, usurps local control, and turns schools into giant
test prep centers (ibid).
They currently have fewer than 200 members. They are involved with organizing
opposition to the FCAT, including organizing articles and information for parents about
the FCAT.
Eighty percent of teachers in the American Federation of Teachers Union (AFT)
claim that “there is too much testing” and 87 percent claim that testing “has pushed other
important subjects and activities out of the curriculum” (www.aft.org).
The resistance to the FCAT has not been widespread. Florida Governor Jeb Bush
has been able to appear “strong” on education by implementing a top-down solution. The
hegemonic ideals of neo-liberalism are used for the successful implementation of this
plan, minimizing resistance. In addition, the use of simulacra such as the “A+ Plan”, of
which the FCAT is a part, are generally taken at its sign value.
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3.6 Conclusions
The focus of this thesis is to investigate how the FCAT affects and reflects socioeconomic status. This chapter is suggestive of ways in which the neo-liberal discourse
has infiltrated education, as evident in the FCAT as part of educational reform focused on
implementing market reforms.
However, the FCAT is not measuring simply the educational value added at the
school. Test scores are influenced by broader geographies of social inequality. By
assuming the geography of social empowerment to be a homogenous plane creates the
FCAT as a force of inequality reproduction.
The persuasive aspects of funding implications based on a standard comparison
amongst schools on curriculum translate into a deterioration of teacher autonomy and
professionalism. This shift is accompanied by change in the discourse concerning the
purpose of education. The FCAT changes the future of political empowerment, because
it shifts educational purpose away from civic responsibility. Rather than addressing
inequality through democratic deliberation, the FCAT silences discussions regarding the
geographies of social inequality.
What are strategies that work in the classroom? What are the things bring success
to schools like Irving Elementary School in Chicago? The scale of reform through the
FCAT can distract from discussions concerning the implementation of in-class strategies.
For instance, when teachers at Irving identified (through consensus) reading and writing
as in need of the most improvement in the early years of their successful reform, they
began with an open curriculum that involved one key aspect. It did not matter what the
students wrote about, as long as they wrote something. And the teachers complained that
they did not have the time or resources to grade it all; so the principal said “Don't grade
it!” (Armstrong 2004). Also, over-emphasis of grammatical rules can inhibit students
from writing.
The time that students spent writing, and their enthusiasm to write,
increased exponentially from days before an open-style curriculum. When an eighth
grade student who has fifth grade writing skills is graded at an eighth grade level, it has a
tendency to make writing painful, embarrassing, shameful, which can increase resistance
in writing.
42
Teachers stayed flexible in their lesson plans. This was to harness the students'
interest into constructive learning processes. If, at the end of reading a story, the students
took the discussion in a way that was different than the teacher expected or had planned
lessons and writing assignments, the attitude was “Okay, you already know what to write
about, so write!” (Armstrong 2004).
The focus on school-wide policies based upon standardized testing does not
address classroom strategies. With all of the discussion of accountability, performance,
and the obsession of measuring education, discussion about what actually works in the
classroom has been cast aside. There needs to be a refocus of educational reform towards
plans that make education work better for teachers and students. At Irving, that meant
having a principal who operated through a consensus with the teachers. The teachers
were actively involved in decisions that affected their teaching conditions. Also, new
classroom strategies were implemented by a volunteer basis. If they worked, other
teachers saw it and implemented the changes themselves. Even the best strategies in
school reform can fail because if teachers think it will fail, it will. Teachers must agree
with education reform in order for it to work (ibid).
Parental involvement was increased. Parent teacher conferences were increased
to four times a year. On report cards, students were asked to grade themselves and
comment on their performance.
These are some strategies that can work no matter what the socio-economics
background of the students.
However, focusing school reform on school-wide
comparisons is too broad. The differences in school performance at this level are linked
to broader networks of interaction through the lived spaces of students, social and
political inequality.
The difference of ability among teachers at a particular school can rival the
overall difference of ability of teachers among schools. When we evaluate education at
the school level the ability to distinguish among successful teaching strategies and
inferior ones is lost.
By assuming that the geography of education is unassociated to other geographies
of social, political, or economic inequality, the FCAT creates a punitive system that is
generally fixed in advance. By ignoring the existing topology of inequality in Florida,
inequality is reproduced.
43
The next chapter puts the theories presented in this chapter to an empirical test.
To what extent, if any, do the contextual geographies that comprise students’ daily lived
experiences outside of the school affect their performance on the FCAT?
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CHAPTER IV: EMPERICAL INVESTIGATIONS OF FCAT SCORES
I now examine how the FCAT reflects the existing socio-economic differentials
of Florida. The FCAT assumes that the school grades measure the average educational
value added to students at a school, when it actually measures educational attainment. As
educational attainment has been theorized to relate to broader inequalities in society, I
now quantify the relationship between various indicators of socio-economics as they
relate to FCAT scores.
The importance of this quantification is in demonstrating how the FCAT is
potentially reproducing inequitable social relations by ignoring their existence. The
extent to which the variation of particular socio-economic variables is shown to be
significantly related to the variation in the distribution of FCAT scores is suggestive of
how much the FCAT is less of a measure of effective schooling and more of a reflection
of socio-economics.
The FCAT, while being touted as a mechanism to provide
motivation through the implementation of quasi-market forces in order to improve all
schools, has the potential of reinforcing existing gaps in school quality, further reducing
existing opportunities of social mobility, and threatening the democratic foundations of
an educated populace.
4.1 Defining Variables
School grades are given in the FCAT as one of five quanta, “A” through “F”, with
rankings similar to customary grades given to individual students. The variables used in
this study that are associated with broader inequalities in society are: the percentage of
racial minority students at the school level (Race), the percentage of students of a school
who qualify for government assisted free or reduced lunch (Poverty) (both obtained from
45
FCAT website2), and the average single-family residential property value (AVP) of a
school attendance zone (2004 Tax Roll data, manipulated in a GIS).
The poverty
variable refers to percentage of students in a school who either live in poverty or are at
risk of living in poverty.
The limitation of the property value analysis (AVP) lies in the unavailability of
data. There is no centralized collection site for school zone attendance data in GIS
compatible format, nor are districts required to create them. I was able to obtain data for
eight counties in Florida that represent a diverse range of countries across the length of
the state. They are Alachua, Bay, Broward, Duval, Leon, Pasco, Seminole, and St.
John’s (Figure 1).
Figure 1 Study Area of Average Residential Property Values for Elementary School
Zones
Additionally, the data only consider single family residential houses. It does not
consider multi-family housing units, such as apartments or condominiums. Furthermore,
2
http://fcat.fldoe.org/default.asp
46
it does not distinguish between rented and owned properties. This omission is due to the
incapability of comparing property values of apartments versus single family houses.
The strength of the data is that it speaks to a greater diversity of wealth among
school attendance zones. As opposed to the at-risk-of-poverty variable, which each
student is measured as “yes” or “no”, the property value data exists on an interval scale,
in which each property falls on a continuous range.
I performed data analysis on two different spatial scales. The first uses the three
variables and concerns only elementary schools for the counties where the school
attendance zone GIS files were available. Afterward, I do a similar statistical analysis
without the GIS generated data for the whole state. This uses the Race and Poverty
variables for all public schools (elementary, middle, and high) in Florida. Due to the
covariance in FCAT school grades and school type (elementary, middle or high schools),
I also use school type as a control variable in the state-wide analysis.
The percentage of racial minority students (Race) of a school is an important
variable in the context of the existing spatial inequities in the access of education. It is
defined by the percentage of students at a school who are not white. Through the
apartheid race relations of the South, and through the inequalities of recent immigrant
populations, the social construction of race has led to the persistent disempowerment of
minorities. When there exist correlations between race and performance on educational
tests such as the FCAT, they do not to suggest that different ethnicities (however they are
defined) are naturally inferior; rather, their oppression is contingent upon the social
construction of race (Stoler 1995). If the FCAT school grades are significantly related to
racial composition of the school, it suggests a violation of the assumption that FCAT
scores are a measurement of the educational value added at the school level.
Before getting into the correlations and regressions, some basic visualization helps to see
the distribution of the data. The box plot in Figure 2 demonstrates the relationship
between student minority rates and elementary school FCAT grades.
The median
percentage for student minority rates goes down as FCAT grades increase. The graphs
break the data into quartiles; one fourth of the percentage rates for each school lie above
the line, inside the box, one forth lie below the line inside the box, and the uppermost and
lowest quartiles lie outside of the box, but within the T-lines. The circle (397) that is
outside of the box and stems represents an outlier of the data. We see that all of the
47
schools that received “F” grades had over 70% minority rates, and the median minority
rate of “F” schools was close to 100%. Of the schools receiving “A” grades, there were
some schools with high rates of minority students, but the median is much lower than for
any other grade. The general inverse relationship between minority rates and FCAT
school grades is suggested by this box plot.
Figure 2 Minority Rates and FCAT School Grades for Elementary Schools in Sample Area
A similar trend holds for the relationship between rates of minorities and FCAT
school grades for the state-wide data (Figure 3). In general, the worse scoring schools
have high rates of minorities, and the better scoring schools have lower rates of
minorities.
48
Figure 3 Minority Rates and FCAT School Grades State-Wide, All grade Levels
The percentage of students receiving free or reduced lunch (Poverty) is an
important indicator of the composition of students who live near or below the poverty
line. The federal government has standards for students to receive free or discounted
prices for school lunches. The proportion of students who qualify is a good indicator of
the general socio-economic makeup of the school. If FCAT scores are statistically
related to this variable, it is apparent that the FCAT can worsen socio-economic
disparities through the systematic funding increases to schools that come from more
advantaged strata of society.
Figure 4 (p. 50) shows the relationship between the percentages of students who
qualify for free or reduced school lunch and FCAT school grades.
49
Similar to the
minority rate and school grade box plot, we see that high rates of poverty in a school are
related to lower FCAT school grades. By grouping the schools by school grade, we see
that the medium poverty variable declines as FCAT scores increase. This suggests that
schools with more students living in poverty generally receive worse FCAT school
grades and ones that have lower rates of poverty score better.
Figure 4 Poverty Rates and FCAT School Grades for Elementary Schools in Sample Area
50
Figure 5 Poverty Rates and FCAT School Grades State-Wide, All grade Levels
A similar trend is evident overall.
The median poverty rate of schools is
generally inversely correlated to the FCAT school grades (see Figure 5).
Another variable is used to examine the financial composition of students of a
school.
Using a Geographic Information System (GIS) I found the average of the
residential property values (APV) that lie within each school attendance zones. By
overlaying the school attendance boundaries on the property values, I was able to
aggregate the average of the single family residential properties for each school
attendance zone in order to compare property values with FCAT school grades (see
Figure 6).
51
Figure 6 Residential Property Values and FCAT School Grades for Sample Counties
Figure 6 shows a much weaker relationship between single-family residential
property values and 2005 FCAT school grades.
The schools receiving “C” grades
actually have the lowest median single-family residential property values.
The “A”
schools still had the highest median properties, but the trend overall is much weaker than
the apparent relationship between minority rates or poverty to FCAT school grades
In the following pages, I include three maps for each of the counties in the sample
area (Figures 7-30). The counties are broken into polygons that represent the elementary
school attendance zones. The first map of each county are shaded according to the
average single-family residential property values, with the red zones representing the
lowest property values and the green zones representing the highest. There are five color
52
classifications, broken into groups by Jenk’s Natural Breaks.
Jenk’s Natural Breaks is
an algorithm to divide observations into classes that minimizes the difference from the
mean of each class.
This causes the breaks in the choropleth to correspond more
“naturally” in the data.
Overlaid onto the attendance zones is a circle, the size of which represents the
FCAT school grade. The largest circles represent “A” schools and the smallest represent
“F” schools. This allows for simultaneous visualization of FCAT school grades and
average residential property values (AVP) of a school.
I also included maps of the same elementary attendance zones, which are shaded
according to the Race and Poverty variables. These maps serve to show the spatial
concentrations of poverty and minority residences, which is not apparent from the box
plots alone. They are also categorized according to Jenk’s Natural Breaks method. The
polygons shaded red represents the attendance zones that have the high student minority
and poverty rates for the given county.
For instance, we see that in Alachua County (Figure 7) that there is a
concentration of poorer properties just east of the downtown area. Correspondingly,
there are smaller circles, representing the “D” and “C” FCAT graded schools. Other
counties show similar patterns. It is important to note how the socio-economic trends are
generally much larger than the individual school attendance zones. Attendance zones
that have a particular value are generally surrounded by similar zones. When the socioeconomic geography is considered, the de facto segregation becomes clear. The task of
creating an equitable public education system based upon geographic attendance zones is
difficult.
Consider Leon County. Upon reviewing Table 3, just over 80% of the schools
have minority rates that do not fall within the mean 30% of the district average. When
we view the maps of Leon County (Figures 19-21), it is apparent that the segregation of
the schools is reflective of segregation of other socio-economic and racial aspects.
Variances in property values, racial composition, and poverty are not randomly strewn
across Leon County. These phenomena exhibit very clear spatial concentrations and
patterns.
53
Figure 7 Alachua County Elementary School Attendance Zones with Average Residential
Property Values v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
Figure 8 Alachua County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Minority Rates
v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
54
Figure 9 Alachua County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Poverty Rates
v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
Figure 10 Bay County Elementary School Attendance Zones with Average Residential
Property Values v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
55
Figure 11 Bay County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Minority Rates v.
2005 FCAT School Grades
Figure 12 Bay County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Poverty Rates v.
2005 FCAT School Grades
56
Figure 13 Broward County Elementary School Attendance Zones with Average Residential
Property Values v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
Figure 14 Broward County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Minority
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
57
Figure 15 Broward County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Poverty
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
Figure 16 Duval County Elementary School Attendance Zones with Average Residential
Property Values v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
58
Figure 17 Duval County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Minority Rates
v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
Figure 18 Duval County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Poverty Rates v.
2005 FCAT School Grades
59
Figure 19 Leon County Elementary School Attendance Zones with Average Residential
Property Values v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
Figure 20 Leon County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Minority Rates v.
2005 FCAT School Grades
60
Figure 21 Leon County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Poverty Rates v.
2005 FCAT School Grades
Figure 22 Manatee County Elementary School Attendance Zones with Average Residential
Property Values v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
61
Figure 23 Manatee County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Minority
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
Figure 24 Manatee County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Poverty Rates
v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
62
Figure 25 Seminole County Elementary School Attendance Zones with Average Residential
Property Values v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
Figure 26 Seminole County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Minority
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
63
Figure 27 Seminole County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Poverty
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
Figure 28 St Johns County Elementary School Attendance Zones with Average Residential
Property Values v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
64
Figure 29 St Johns County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Minority
Rates v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
Figure 30 St Johns County Elementary School Attendance Zones with School Poverty Rates
v. 2005 FCAT School Grades
65
4.2 Spearman Correlation and PLUM Regression
Now that a basic visualization has been provided that shows the general trend of
the relationships to the socio-economic variables and FCAT school grades, I perform
some statistical analysis, to see if there is a significant relationship between the socioeconomic variables and FCAT school grades.
It is essential to note that the FCAT school grade is ordinal. The grades do not
exist on an interval, like temperature measurements, but are one of five ranked quanta. In
order to analyze whether the variables exhibit statistically significant relationships to
FCAT school grades, I chose two methods appropriate for analyzing ordinal data.
Spearman’s rank correlation (Sr) was used to find the correlation between the three
variables and the FCAT school grade. The correlation coefficients range from one to
negative one, with one being a perfect positive correlation, negative one being a perfect
negative correlation, and zero signifying no correlation. P-values are then provided to
evaluate if the correlations are significant.
I also provide a Polytomous Universal Model (PLUM) ordinal logit regression.
This creates a mathematical model using all of the socio-economic variables together that
most closely approximates the variation in FCAT school grades. Significant tests are
provided to show how confident we can be that the variation in FCAT school grades is
related to the variation in each respective socio-economic variable.
There are two data sets examined.
The first is a sample that consists of
elementary schools in the counties for which school attendance zone data was available.
The GIS analysis of average residential property values for each elementary school
attendance zone (AVP), in addition to the Race and Poverty variables are used (N = 387).
The second data set is of the entire state of Florida, covering all school levels
(elementary, middle and high), without the GIS generated property value data (N =
2270). This uses the Race and Poverty variables as well as the school-type.
4.3 Results of Spearman’s Correlation of Sample Area
There is a positive correlation (r = .328) between average single family residential
property (AVP) values within a school’s attendance zone and the school’s FCAT grade in
2005. The attendance zones with the higher property values have significantly higher
FCAT grades. This suggests that socio-economics affect the FCAT results.
66
There is a negative correlation between the rates of students who qualify for free
or reduced lunches and FCAT school grades (r = -.363), meaning that the more students
who come from families near or below the poverty line at a particular school, the lower
the FCAT grade at that school is likely to be.
Table 4 Spearman’s Correlation of Sample Area
APV
Poverty
Race
Sr
.328
-.363
-.498
p-value
.000
.000
.000
N = 387
There is also a negative correlation between student minority rates of a particular
school and that school’s FCAT grade (r = -.498). This suggests that as schools have
higher rates of minority students, their scores on the FCAT tend to be lower. Thus, the
inequitable social relations constructed through race are reproduced through their
performance on the FCAT tests.
The p-values for all of the variables are less than .01. We can therefore reject the
null hypothesis that there is no relationship. All of the p-values are .000, so we can say
with confidence that the correlation coefficients are not random. When each of them is
compared independently from each other to the FCAT school grades, we can say with
confidence that they are statistically significant.
In order to see how the variables in the sample explain grades together, we will
examine the variables in a PLUM ordinal logit regression. Due to the ordinal data type
of the FCAT school grade, a PLUM ordinal logit regression is appropriate (Norušis
1995).
4.4 Results of PLUM Ordinal Logit Regression of Sample Area
The model created using the PLUM regression creates coefficients that describe
how each variable affects FCAT scores (table 4.2). If the APV, Poverty, and Race
coefficients are represented by β1, β2, and, β3, respectively and their values are x1, x2, and
x3, respectively, the approximation of FCAT school grades is:
67
FCAT school grades = β1x1 + β2x2 + β3x3
Table 5 PLUM Ordinal Regression of Sample Area
β-Estimate
APV
.000
Poverty -.029
Race
-.011
Model-fitting= .000
Goodness-of-fit = 1.000
Nagelkerke = .300
Standard
Error
.000
.005
.005
Wald Significance
.058
.000
.016
FCAT scores are best explained through the Poverty and Race variables. That is,
the FCAT is significantly inversely related to both the percentages of students who
qualify for government assisted free or reduced lunch and to the percentage of students
who are minorities. The correlated variation of average property values and FCAT school
grades is also better explained through the other variables. Although there is a direct
correlation, when considered with the other variables in the regression, the variation in
average property values is not significant in explaining the variation in FCAT school
grades.
The “Model-fitting” value (.000) is a chi-square statistic that shows that the
regression model is significantly improved by including the coefficients of the variables
(McCullagh and Nelder 19893). The regression better models the variance in FCAT
school grades when it uses the socio-economic variables selected.
The “Goodness-of-fit” value (1.000) is a Pearson’s chi-square deviance
significance statistic.
This tests if the observed data are inconsistent to the model
constructed in the regression. With a goodness-of-fit value of 1.000, the observations
(poverty and race) are not unrelated to the model constructed with these variables to
predict FCAT school grades.
In other words, the observed data are similar to the
predictions of data based upon the model.
The Nagelkerke value is a measure of pseudo R2 values that describes how much
of the variation of FCAT scores is due to the variation in the variables of the model.
68
With a Nagelkerke value of .300, we see that 30% of the variation in the distribution of
FCAT school grades is due directly to the variation in these specific socio-economic
variables.
4.5 Spearman’s Correlation using all Public Schools in Florida
As the property value variable was not significant in the regression, and it was the
variable that was limiting the sample in scope, the next section performs the same
statistical analysis, but it includes all public schools in Florida. Another variable was
added however. School type (elementary, middle, or high) was added as a control
variable for the PLUM regression.
Table 6 Spearman’s Correlation for All Florida Public Schools
Sr
School-type -.346
Poverty
-.424
Race
-.355
N=2770
p-value
.000
.000
.000
We see that with the school type, there is a negative correlation with FCAT scores
that is significant (p-value is less than .01). This means that middle (type 2) schools
scored significantly lower than elementary schools (type 1) and high schools (type 3)
scored significantly lower than middle schools.
There was also a significant negative correlation between the Poverty variable
and FCAT school grades (-.424). This demonstrates that the higher rates of students
receiving free or reduced lunch, the lower their FCAT scores were, just as was seen in the
sample area.
The results are similar with the minority rates at schools (Race). The schools
with higher percentage rates of minority students scored significantly lower on the FCAT
(correlation of -.355 and p-value of .000).
3
McCullagh, P., and J. A. Nelder. 1989. Generalized Linear Models. London: Chapman & Hall.
69
There are significant correlations of these variables to the FCAT school grades
independent from each other. Now a PLUM regression is performed to see to what extent
these socio-economic variables account for the variation in FCAT school grades together
in one model.
Table 7 PLUM Ordinal Logit Regression All Florida Public Schools
Estimate
School type -1.285
Poverty
-0.050
Race
-0.008
Model-fitting = .000
Goodness-of-fit =1.000
Nagelkerke = .430
Std. Error
.047
.002
.002
Wald Significance
.000
.000
.000
While some of the relationship is due to the difference in school type, the basic
relationship between FCAT and minority rates and free or reduced lunch rates endure
after controlling for school type. If the variance in different school types is controlled for
when analyzing the relationship of FCAT school grades with the socio-economic
variables, the relationship is significant.
The model-fitting value (.000) suggests that the model is significantly better in
predicting FCAT school grades when the socio-economic variables are included. The
Goodness-of-fit value (1.000) demonstrates that the observed values of the Poverty and
Race variables are not unrelated to the model.
Thus, the model is significant in
explaining FCAT school grades and the observed variables, Poverty and Race, are
significantly related to the model.
From the Nagelkerke value, we can see that 43% of the variation in FCAT scores
is due to the variation in the socio-economic variables investigated and by using schooltype as a control variable. It is important to not assume that the other 57% of variation in
FCAT school grades is due to teaching “inefficiencies”; they could be attributable to a
wide range of other variables not considered in this study.
70
4.6 Statistical Conclusions
After performing a statistical analysis to test the assumed relationships between
different socio-economic variables and FCAT school grades, it can be said with
confidence that FCAT school grades are significantly related to the race and class of the
students who attend a school.
The box plots, which group the schools by grades and the maps, showing the
spatial concentrations of poverty and minority rates and subsequent FCAT school grades,
suggest relationships between the defined socio-economic variables and performance on
the FCAT.
We have seen that there are significant correlations between single family
residential property values, Race, and Poverty for the elementary schools in the sample.
There are also significant correlations between the Race and Poverty variables and FCAT
school grades, respectively, at the state-wide level, for all school types (elementary,
middle, and high).
When the three variables of the sample area are modeled together as a regression,
the variation FCAT school grades that is correlated to property values is better explained
by the Race and Poverty variables, and is subsequently not a significant variable in the
model. When controlling for the variance of FCAT school grades attributed to school
type (elementary, middle, or high), the percentage of minority students of a school and
the percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced lunch significantly explains
variations in FCAT school grades for all Florida public schools.
These results lead to the concluding chapter. Now that it can be said with
confidence that the FCAT reflects the existing inequities in the landscape of educational
access, what does this mean for public school students in Florida?
71
CHAPTER V: CONCLUSIONS
The FCAT both reflects and affects the geography of social and political
inequality. The empirical analysis shows that various socio-economic indicators are
significant in explaining FCAT grades. To ignore the influence of social relations that
exist beyond the scale of the school on standardized tests and to reward the schools that
perform the best is to increase inequality among schools.
Given the historical geography of educational inequities, and the legacy of
apartheid conditions, it is essential to contextualize the FCAT. Quasi-market reforms are
blind to the existing social inequities that are reflected in the public education system and
standardized tests. Ignoring the unequal geography of educational attainment in this way
is to reproduce it.
The façade of neutral, objective measurements of education value added is further
dissolved with the examination of the FCAT as a coercive form of observation. The
effect on the narrowing of curriculum and the construction of teachers as “managed
professionals” is part and parcel of the reconfiguration of education for the social purpose
of subsidizing private firms through the socialized production of workers for the job
market. The FCAT facilitates the change of discourse on the purpose of education,
resulting in the neglect of social empowerment and democratic purposes of education.
The funding bonuses through the “School Recognition Program” do affect schools’
material being, but the effect reaches further than these bonuses. The FCAT has the
potential to direct education away from political empowerment by denying students the
ability to examine the unequal power relations throughout and beyond their schools. The
shift in educational discourse from preparing citizens to govern their governors to the
production of automatons has been implemented through the silence of the multiplicity of
different educational values. By focusing on a quantity of education added to students,
72
and ignoring different values, there has been a change in educational purpose inserted
along with the FCAT. The thin veneer of objectivity in grading serves to hide this coup.
Some schools are full of students who know they will go to college afterwards.
For many others, college and other opportunities of social mobility are not an option.
The social standing that we are born into is largely reflected through the education
system. This is not to say that a person born in one of the poorest ghettos, with no
encouragement around them, cannot go to the public library and teach themselves, have
access to the knowledge of the world, and climb the social ladder, go to college, and rise
to a position of empowerment. This is entirely possible, but it is the exception to what is
systemic- inequality.
Inequalities in society are reproduced to different degrees. There is no way of
completely re-writing the geography of inequalities, nor will it be perfectly reproduced.
It is a matter of shifts along continuous spectra. Policies concerning public education
have affects that pull the systems in particular directions. The problem is not whether
education is changed, but how it is changed.
The problem with the shift of the educational paradigm accompanying the FCAT
towards neo-liberal economic discourse and away from political empowerment has great
effects on the social relations of Florida. In learning about their social system, through
the narrowly dictated state curriculum, students may learn about citizens and
governments in general, but the discussion of their specific status will be silenced. It is a
failure of public education when students are unable to learn about their social standing
in hopes of improving it.
In the same way that democracy depends on a reasonable degree of
equality in the distribution of income, it depends on a reasonable degree of
equality in the distribution of education. If groups or individuals have a
relative monopoly on knowledge, information and understanding there is
no reason to believe that power would be widely distributed, whatever the
extent of democratic forms of organization (MacEwan 1999: 187).
One of the problems of the infiltration of neo-liberal ideology into education is
that education itself is one service that free markets are unable to provide. There is not
an effective economic demand for the education of all citizens. After surplus value
extraction of labor, the poor and marginalized cannot afford by themselves to supply
73
public education. If all schools were run for profit, many would not have access to
schooling.
Capitalism inevitably creates inequality in society. Inequality is necessarily an
outcome of competitive market forces, and from the tension between labor and capital.
There are deeper levels of contradiction among the purposes of schools to
support individual ethical development and independence, citizenship and
accountability to community, and integration into the economic order.
These purposes conflict since moral community formation and democratic
equality depend upon the cooperation and inclusion of all, whereas
capitalist economic strength is predicated on principles of competition and
survival of the fittest (Glass 2000: 287).
Without citizen oversight, social inequality from markets threatens the
democracy, equality, and opportunity, which in turn threatens markets. In order to
prevent markets from self-destructing, they must be regulated for their continual
functioning.
Education is not immune; quasi-market forces will lead to increased
inequality among schools and in society at large.
The question of improving education is an issue of social priorities. There are no
magic tricks or quick fixes to make drastic improvements; if there were, we would have
already discovered them. If teachers' salaries rivaled those of other highly valued jobs,
then the quality of teachers would increase as the best and brightest would not have to
accept such a noble position with the consequence of individual material sacrifice.
We come to the conclusion that “it has become almost unspeakable to suggest that
education might provide working-class or minority ethnic children with a means of
understanding their own situation and their society” (Wrigley 2005: p. 97). For the
children growing up in the public education system, it is necessary to understand their
own situation within the context of the social relations of society as a whole. Through
the FCAT and its coercive observation, there is a disempowerment of the next generation,
which prevents the understanding their own social standing, serving as a block to selfempowerment. It is the public education system that must be the great equalizer of
society. Education is the key to social stability, economic prosperity, the annihilation of
prejudice, and the means through which peaceful social cooperation is founded.
74
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Richie Kent was born in Atlanta, Georgia on June 21, 1981. He graduated from
Washington High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1999. He then obtained a Bachelor of
Science degree from the Department of Geography at The Florida State University. His
master’s degree is pending the successful defense of this thesis.
He served as a Geographic Information Systems research assistant for the Devoe
Moore Center at Florida State University from May 2004 to May 2005. In the fall
semester of 2005, he taught the “Introduction to GIS” laboratory sections. In the spring
of 2006, he was a T.A. for the “Geography of Hunger” at Florida State University.
Richie presented at the American Association of Geographer’s (AAG) annual
meeting in Denver, Colorado, in April 2005. He also presented at the Florida Society of
Geographer’s Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida, in February, 2006.
Both
presentations concerned the FCAT.
He has also published a map in Cuentos Amazonicos, by Juan Carlos Galeano. It
is a book that chronicles the folk tales of indigenous people who live on the Peruvian,
Columbian, and Brazilian Amazon.
Currently, he is working as a GIS analyst for CH2M HILL in Atlanta, Georgia.
There he is involved with bio-remediation efforts.
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