The board member, Rick Roach, is no dummy. He has two master’s degrees in education and educational psychology, and he’s working on a doctorate. He’s trained 18,000 teachers in 25 states, and served on his school board for four terms.

But his reading score on a version of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test was 62%, which would have sent him to remediation classes. On the math part, he guessed on all 60 questions, getting only 10 right.

In an email to education critic Marion Brady, Roach wrote:

It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.

Roach went on to note how his life would have much different had he been required to take the FCAT in high school, and done as poorly as he did now.

He makes a valid point which should bring up school “reformers” up short, but probably won’t. While reformers bemoan the supposed lack of “teacher accountability,” do they also hold accountable the makers of the tests they buy to measure teacher and student performance? If even one well educated adult fails a test for 10th graders, something is very wrong. Scientifically speaking, if our theory is that standardized tests accurately measure student performance, just one negative result would invalidate the theory. At the very least, Roach’s test results should either call into question his qualifications as an educator or the validity of the FCAT.

Chances are, neither question will be raised. Roach is clearly well qualified. No argument there. But school assessment tests are the latest fad in education “reform” — a form of quality control for a corporate mindset that treats schools like factories, teachers like assembly line workers and students like widgets. Too many politicians, big names in education (Michelle Rhee?) and test makers have invested a lot of time and money to give up their pet assessment exams because one board member flunked an exam.

But Americans need to get off the testing bandwagon long enough to evaluate the tests being used. Students should not be pigeon-holed, nor teachers be punished, on the basis of only fill-in-the-oval examinations. Most colleges in the USA no longer use only the SAT or ACT to make admissions decisions, after all. They use other measures of student quality, too.

China could serve as a model of what not to do. Standardized tests are the be-all, end-all of a person’s education here. The dreaded gaokao — the college entrance exam — is the ultimate hurdle for every high school student here. Graduation is merely icing on the cake. A student’s score on the gaokao determines his or her future for the next four years, and probably beyond. Unlike American colleges, Chinese colleges only consider a student’s gaokao score. If you’re even a few points below the cutoff for the school, tough luck, kid.

It’s draconian, to say the least. And there’s no way out. I’ve had several students here who are bright, well spoken (in Chinese and English), thoughtful and diligent, but their gaokao scores banished them to this third-tier university. Future employers will give preference to graduates of first- and second-tier schools, perhaps disregarding other qualifications, because it’s efficient. With a huge population, bosses have to find some way to whittle down the applicant pool to a halfway manageable level.

The Chinese system invites cheating and fraud, because the gaokao, and the many other required examinations, carry so much baggage. The allegations of fraud in the Washington, DC, testing system while Rhee was superintendent only hint at what could happen in the US if people take the whole testing system too seriously.

I have seen what damage standardized tests can do to Chinese students (including suicide). America doesn’t need to go in the same direction.
————————–
The links above about Roach and Brady take you to The Washington Post. Brady has the original commentary at his own blog, www.marionbrady.com.
The link for the Teflon-coated Michelle Rhee is to a scathing critique of Rhee by Diane Ravitch, a fairly conservative but very thoughtful education expert.

The Sri Lankan-born high school graduate has had two operations already, and awaits a third.

Bary ran away to Florida in July with the help of a Christian pastor who had befriended her. Once arriving in Orlando, the girl, who says she converted to Christianity at 13, lived with married pastors Blake and Beverly Lorenz for nearly two weeks before the Lorenzes told child welfare officials where Bary was.

In interviews, Bary claimed that her parents were upset with her conversion and that she was afraid that her father would kill her if she returned home. Law enforcement officials from Florida and Ohio, however, reported there was no credible threat to her safety.

Nevertheless, Bary has lived with foster parents in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, after her court-ordered return to Ohio in October. She turns 18 in August, at which point she will be able to leave foster care.

Her conversion and flight to Florida have become a rallying point for anti-Islamic Christian polemicists, who have used Bary as a “poster child” for honor killings, though there was never any real threat to her life. Meanwhile, they have accused Bary’s parents and their mosque of being Islamic extremists, though again there is no evidence of the allegations.

The whole situation is a sad commentary on the abuse of religious belief. That a young girl is so ill is even more tragic.

In the aftermath, the Lorenzes have lost their jobs. (Their church board took issue with the Lorenzes breaking the law by harboring a runaway child without notifying the proper authorities.) Her parents have lost their privacy and a great deal of their reputation. (Law enforcement investigations found the parents posed no threat to their daughter’s safety, but Bary’s anti-Islam fans still trumpet that the girl’s life was in danger.) And Bary will likely end up with a new identity as a “persecuted Christian” who escaped the clutches of Islam — a newly minted spokeswoman for the Religious Fear-mongering Right.

You wait. There’s bound to be a book or movie deal waiting in the wings. And the obligatory appearance on Oprah.

In the reality-based world, a runaway child returning home would be a good thing, if the parents are decent, upstanding members of society, which the Barys appear to be.

In the apocalyptic world of the far-far-rightwing, however, Rifqa’s Muslim parents are sure to kill their Christian convert daughter, because, you know, all Muslims do that sort of thing, every day. Pamela Geller and her fellow Muslim-haters have themselves worked up into a froth, accusing the Bary family of every crime known to humanity, merely because the Barys are Muslim …

… and because Rifqa, whose own grip on reality seems kind of tenuous, has people convinced that her family will either kill her or arrange for her sudden demise once she returns to that lawless hotbed of Islamic terrorism, Columbus, Ohio.

Law enforcement officers and child welfare officials say the likelihood of Rifqa being killed is nil. Her parents are pretty normal sounding, middle-class Americans who have the “misfortune” of being dark-skinned Muslim immigrants with exotic names.

The parallels to the “birther” crusade are obvious. A lot of folks also cannot accept that a dark-skinned son of a foreign-born Muslim with an exotic name became president of the USA.

Meanwhile, Rifqa’s rightwing Christian supporters are now claiming that the child protection services of both Florida and Ohio (two hotbeds of flaming liberalism and soon-to-be Islamic republics) are violating the girl’s freedom of religion by restricting her access to the Internet, email and her cellphone. You know, Pontius Pilate did the same thing to Jesus, just before his execution.

Rifqa Bary became a Christian about four years ago. Her parents knew about it. She got on Facebook, found some friends there of the born-again, Christian warrior variety, and got really close to said Christians. These people then helped Rifqa leave home, take a Greyhound bus to Orlando, Florida, where she stayed with another Christian warrior pastor and his wife for almost two weeks before they handed her over to child protection services.

Then, while she was in foster care, Rifqa ended up speaking on a national conference prayer call with some movers and shakers of the Christian warrior cult movement.

Duh. Ohio wants to make sure she doesn’t take off again, or unwittingly fan the flames of anti-Islamic hysteria. So, sorry, kid, no phone or computer privileges. It makes sense to me. Rifqa has become a pawn in someone’s bigger game, so the Ohio judge who put the restrictions in place is doing the right thing, protecting a child.

(Yeah, yeah, I know, 17 is too old to be called a child, but in the eyes of the law, she’s a minor until she turns 18 next summer.)

Right Wing Watch has more details on this circus sideshow.

Bary, 17, fled her Columbus home last summer with the assistance of conservative Christians, who bought her a bus ticket to Orlando, where she lived for two weeks with Christian crusaders Blake and Beverly Lorenz. Several days later, the Lorenzes reported Bary’s arrival to Florida’s child protection services.

The immigrant girl from Sri Lanka has become a poster child for those Christians who believe the world is heading for a showdown between the forces of good (Christians) and the forces of evil (Muslims). Feeding on apparently false accusations that Bary’s parents will kill her for leaving her faith, rabid Christians have flocked to her cause like bears to honey.

An Ohio judge has wisely restricted the impressionable girl’s access to the Internet and her cell phone, which has led one anti-Islam nutjob to accuse the Ohio judge of enforcing Muslim sharia law.

Last month, while under foster care in Florida, Bary appeared on a telephone conference call prayer meeting, during which she manically prayed to Jesus, then abruptly stopped, leaving her handlers fellow Christians at a temporary loss for words. The conference call was scheduled to counter the sinister and cosmic influence of the Muslim Prayer Rally in Washington, D.C.

Florida’s child protection service officials have still not explained how Bary was allowed to participate in the event. The Ohio judge seems to have learned something from Florida’s cluelessness.

Bary has fallen in with an extremist set of believers, who even mainstream Christians distrust, according to the website Loonwatch. These folks variously believe that Christians — led by a “Joel’s Army” of young evangelical “soldiers” — are divinely appointed to rule the world, and that Christians must first deal with the Muslim problem. According to these kooks, Islam is a product of the devil, and Bary must be protected from the evil clutches of her parents, who by all rational accounts are loving, Americanized — and very puzzled — parents.

There are a lot of disturbing aspects to the case of Rifqa Bary, but Islam is not one of them. Her fragile understanding of her faiths (old and new), her manipulation at the hands of religious crusaders, and the unwarranted intrusion of Internet demagogues like Pam Geller are a much bigger problem.

JISHOU, HUNAN — Rifqa Bary, the Muslim teen who converted to Christianity and fled to Florida (with help), will be sent back to temporary foster care in her home state of Ohio, a Florida family court judge ruled Tuesday.

Bary, 17, ran away from home at age 16, saying she feared her parents would kill her for converting. Christian ministers helped her take a Greyhound to Orlando, Florida, where she lived with a pastor and his wife for two weeks before they finally reported the situation to local authorities and the girls’ parents.

Law enforcement officers investigating the Bary family found no indication Bary’s life was in danger, and the Florida judge assigned to her case ruled that Ohio’s child protection office is more suitable to decide her case.

Once she arrives in Ohio, Bary will be placed in temporary custody with the Franklin County Children’s Service department.

Bary made headlines recently after she participated in a conference call Christian prayer session preceding the Muslim Prayer Rally in Washington, D.C., last month. Her appearance sparked questions about Bary’s foster parents, who were supposedly keeping her separate from the Christians who had helped her flee her home.

Her story has become the latest cause celebre among fundamentalist Christians, who have adopted her as a kind of “poster child” for anti-Islam rhetoric and quasi-martyrdom. Meanwhile, her parents, who by all appearances are moderate Muslims from Sri Lanka, say they mean the girl no harm and in fact were perfectly comfortable with her Christian faith months before her departure.

It’s shameful that the same people who claim the family is next to importance to God seem so willing to tear apart a family by preying on a young girl’s confusion.

According to Right Wing Watch, the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a Christian group, organized the conference call to counter the Muslim prayer rally in Washington, D.C., last Friday. It seems the task force was quaking in its boots about the possibility of 50,000 Muslims gathering near the Capitol Building.

(Actually, only about 3,000 showed up. They had to put up with Christian hecklers. Welcome to America.)

Part of their fears stems from their mistaken impression that President Barack Obama is secretly Muslim, and his friendly and conciliatory gestures to the world’s Muslims signal a Muslim takeover of the USA. (Incidentally, in case you missed it, the new America will also be simultaneously Marxist, communist, socialist and fascist, as well as an Islamic state. Just so we’re clear.)

From OneNewsNow.com, a wingnut website:

Associated Press says Christian leaders in last night's conference call were unconvinced the gathering will be a time for Muslims to pray together, read the Quran, and celebrate America's religious freedom -- as its organizers insist. Family Research Council president Tony Perkins wondered if the Muslims would be "praying for the well-being of our nation."

Perkins called the Muslim gathering "a wake-up call for the church" and a warning that if Christians do not "fill the void that's in this nation with the truth, it will be filled with something else."

It was Perkins and Shirley Dobson, the head of the task force, who were on the conference call with Bary I highlighted in the last post. As a presumed convert from Islam to Christianity, she was a convenient and suitable “prayer warrior” to inspire the Christians on the conference call to pray against the horrible scourge of 50,000 3,000 Muslims converging on Capitol Hill.

The poor girl is a puppet in the religious right’s campaign against Islam.

Bary was supposed to be under the protection of her foster parents in Orlando, and presumably kept separate from the church people who apparently orchestrated her trip to Florida. According to law enforcement investigations, a pastor, Brian Williams, drove her to the Greyhound bus station in Columbus, Ohio, despite Bary’s own testimony she hitchhiked there. The bus ticket was bought in Orlando under a false name by someone. Bary said she bought the ticket herself. When she arrived in Orlando, she lived in the home of Blake and Beverley Lorenz for two weeks before authorities finally removed her into foster care.

Blake Lorenz is pastor of Global Revolution Church, an independent fundamentalist church in Orlando.

This whole story makes me sick to my stomach. It smacks of fundamentalist Christians using a confused teenage girl as a figurehead for their bigoted campaign against Islam. Despite Bary’s testimony in court that she would be killed if she is sent back home, the Bary family seems to be far from the extremist Muslims the wingnuts allege they are. Her father attended a Catholic school in his native Sri Lanka, and the family attends a mosque in Columbus that is as part of the local community as the local synagogues and churches.

There are also suggestions that Bary’s understanding of honor killings is flawed, that she is parroting an incorrect definition of the practice fed to her by her captors Christian benefactors.

Right Wing Watch has more commentary about what Bary means to the fundies here.. This writer, a Muslim, has even more disturbing background about the Christian group Bary fell in with in Columbus a few years ago — the Xenos Christian Fellowship. Even Christians think Xenos is a cult, apparently.

Further background: there is a small, but influential group of conservative Christians who believe the only way Christ will come again is to convert everyone on Earth to Christianity. This motivation is what drives groups like Youth With A Mission, Campus Crusade for Christ and others, and convinces US servicemen and servicewomen to proselytize Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan — against orders. Talk to Action has a lot of information about this movement (of which Sarah Palin is part). Go visit their site and be suitably aghast.