Collier County School Superintendent Patton: Why Do You Propagandize School Test Scores?

On August 21, the Collier County School District published an Assessment Brief regarding its Cambridge advanced testing scores for students (click here).   The Assessment Brief “highlights” those subjects where district students performed well, but fails to mention the low scoring subjects.  In follow-up, Steve Bracci sent the below e-mail to School Superintendent Dr. Kamela Patton:

From: Steve Bracci
Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2017 9:27 AM
To: ‘Kamela Patton’ <patton@collierschools.com>
Cc: ‘Roy Terry’, ‘Erika Donalds’, ‘Kelly Lichter’, ‘Erick Carter’, ‘Stephanie Lucarelli’
Subject: Cambridge test results

Superintendent Patton –

Why do you repeatedly insist on propagandizing the district’s scores?  The Cambridge AICE scores you posted on the website are an example.  You cherry-picked the “highlights” showing the top scoring categories, but overlook the categories where the District does poorly. (25% in Biology, 36% in History, 29% in English literature, 0% in Chemistry, 0% in Math).

In fact, in each of these non-highlighted categories, the district’s test performance dramatically decreased year-over-year in these core subjects:

Biology dropped from 33% to 25%
History dropped from 38% to 36%
English Lit dropped from 56% to 29%
Chemistry dropped from 30% to 0 %
Math dropped from 29% to 0%

By your strategy, it seems you think the public is either (i) too stupid or (ii) too lazy to read the data that follows the highlights.  It also seems you are more interested in “marketing” the school district than real classroom success.  Sad!

Sincerely, Steve Bracci

This is posted not to criticize the performance of students or teachers, but rather, to demonstrate the dysfunctionality of a behemoth school district administration that is so hell-bent on aggrandizing its own image, that it distorts the truth about school-based performance.  If Superintendent Patton feels the need to twist statistics to show constant success, without recognizing areas where there needs to be improvement, then Patton is the problem, not the solution.

Those who support the Superintendent without calling out such falsehoods are engaging in politics of an unhealthy sort, with an agenda of protecting the Superintendent at all costs, at the sake of student performance.

RELATED ARTICLE: Thanks to the Teachers Union, Poorest Students in New York Will Be Taught By Worst Teachers

1 reply
  1. Go Figure
    Go Figure says:

    She came over to Collier from Miami-Dade and was one of Carvalho chronies. taking a page from his playbook, nothing bad ever happens in Collier, everything is great, look how wonderful we are!

    Carvalho touts inflated graduation rates, but he leaves out the fact over 60% of students that go to Miami-Dade College need remedial classes and most cannot complete a four-year degree program.

    For that, I do blame the public for sharing Carvalho’s and Patton’s Charlie Crist rose-tinted glasses by failing to express outrage.

    People like myself and the author are in the minority when it comes to speaking out-therein lies the problem.

    Reply

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