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Educational Issues in Broward County's Public School System The Minority Community Perspective
One need only drive around the various neighborhoods in Broward county and you'll see the stark contrast in educational infrastructure that is a clear sign of the budgetary preferences given to affluent neighborhoods over those neighborhoods with a lower than average median income and a greater percentile mixture of minority children. We also have considerable concerns about the state's sudden turn to so called standardized tests to measure the advancement of our students in public schools and the quality of the education they are receiving. In the case of Florida, the FCAT exam not only determines a student's progress, but the cumulative averages are used to determine a major portion of that school's government funding. First of all, by tying funding into these test results, our teachers are complaining that they are running "FCAT factories" where rudimentary drills of the FCAT query set over the past few years is repeated over and over and over again. Rote memorization is not learning, and it is a credit to the individual teachers of the community that so many manage to actually educate our children between these FCAT drills. Secondly, it has been shown repeatedly in empirical testing that standardized tests put minority students being tested at a disadvantage, since cultural elements do insidiously influence the outcomes of the testing. Put simply, the tests are developed with the "average middle class Caucasian student" in mind, not considering the cultural factors that might influence a minority child's performance on such tests. This skews the results of such testing, as has been proven repeatedly over the past several decades. The Fort Lauderdale NAACP is deeply concerned with improving the educational opportunities for all students in our community, assuring that government funding does not inadvertently appear to prioritize the education of any specific demographic over the other groups that exist in Broward's and Greater Fort Lauderdale's diverse communities and neighborhoods.
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