Repeal FCAT

The Florida Comprehensive Achievement test is designed to measure a childs progress in school. It has continually failed to accomplish this goal as the test needs months of student preparation and mile high practice exams for the children to pass it. It has created undo pressure and any scores that are recorded is not a true measure of what a child has learned and/or retained from their normal school curriculum. Instead, it is a testament to how much information a teacher can force-feed into a child before the test is given.
In order to receive passing grades on this test, schools have eliminated two weeks of summer vacation, limited recess, scaled back History, Science, and Computer Labs.
Field trips, where hands on learning and actual experience are no longer available during the first eight months of the school year, again, to allow for more test preparation.
Schools have stopped teaching a meaningful curriculum and have robotically issued FCAT worksheets, test preparation packets, and mindless writing prompts to masquerade as an education.
Gone from sight is a year of Kindergarten where little five year olds are taught to socialize in a school setting, learn through manipulating objects, taught their ABCs and have stories read to them in an imaginative manner that in turn create a love of reading. This too has disappeared from the landscape to add yet another year of FCAT test preparation in the form of daily homework, sentence writing, spelling and intensive phonic practice. Kindergartners are given homework over every weekend!

This petition is demanding the Florida Legislature to repeal the FCAT and replace it with the previous standardized test, the SATs. The SATs required no more than a letter home, advising parents to make sure their child had a good breakfast on the day of the test and a few minutes of instruction on how to bubble in the answers and what to do when you were finished.
Just as HMOs have created Garbage Medicine, FCATs have created Garbage Education and the people of Florida demand it be removed from our schools.