FCAT Science

SB4, the bill on assess­ment and grad­u­a­tion require­ments passed in the Florida House and Sen­ate, and is now headed for Gov­er­nor Crist’s desk for approval. I see SB4 as a pos­i­tive stepin the right direc­tion for the state of Florida to insure that all of its stu­dents become sci­en­tific lit­er­ate cit­i­zens. Essen­tially the bill will elim­i­nate the Sci­ence FCAT at the high school level, and will be replaced by end of the course sci­ence and math exams. SB4 mod­i­fies the state’s present grad­u­a­tion require­ments of 3 sci­ence courses by requir­ing that one of them be a biol­ogy class and a sec­ond be either a chem­istry or physics class. A weak­ness in SB4 is the lack of address­ing the need for stu­dents to take an Earth and Space Sci­ence related course. Hope­fully, this weak­ness will be addressed in the near future. Oppo­nents of the bill argue that stu­dents not seek­ing to pur­sue higher edu­ca­tion or careers in sci­ence and math should not be expected to take addi­tional math and sci­ence courses. Unfor­tu­nately, the oppo­nents of this bill have yet to con­cep­tu­al­ize the “big pic­ture” which is, it’s irrel­e­vant whether a high school stu­dent has the desire to con­tinue onto col­lege or into a sci­ence or math related career or not. Every indi­vid­ual needs to be exposed to “more advanced” math and sci­ence courses so that when they do grad­u­ate from high school they are sci­en­tific lit­er­ate cit­i­zens. If Gov­er­nor Crist gives his seal of approval for SB4 I’m hop­ing that fund­ing is allo­cated for increased mean­ing­ful math, biol­ogy, and physics lab­o­ra­tory expe­ri­ences for the stu­dents. Sec­ondly, fund­ing for pro­vid­ing on-going, qual­ity math and sci­ence  pro­fes­sional staff devel­op­ment for the teach­ers will be essen­tial for the imple­men­ta­tion of SB4’s revised math and sci­ence grad­u­a­tion requirements.