FCAT 5, Michael Thorne, Page 5


T: I believe around sixty-eight percent free and reduced. It's a high percentage.

S: Does the FCAT take time out of classroom instruction?

T: We will get that complaint from some teachers. But again, I'll tell you, if you
 involved FCAT in your curricula and it follows the Sunshine Standards, which I
 believe it does, and if it doesn't, then you can adapt it your program, then there's
 no complaints. It should be part of your curricula. It's not going away, we know
 that, so why not make it part of your curriculum? But yes, I do get complaints
 from a handful of teachers who say, I want to do all these great things, but now
 I've got to stop and do this. There's some truth to that statement, but the real
 sequential way of teaching is to involve part of that in your curricula, and then
 you can still do all those wonderful things.

S: Would you say that complaint comes more from the IB teachers or from others?

T: No, I get it from IB, major programs, even ESE teachers, but it is a small minority
 of teachers. Most of them accept it and know it's a part of the life. Even those
 that complain about it, I find a lot respect in them because they really mean well
 in their program. They're basically wanting to cover things that they think will
 really benefit the students-not that FCAT won't-but it frustrates them that they
 have all these great plans and now that becomes easily two months of their
 curricula that they've got to, in their opinion, shut down and go to, but they really
 don't.

S: Do you think maybe those big plans do cover Sunshine State Standards, but
 maybe not the ones that are directed at the test?

T: That's a possibility. I know every year that the test is taken, students tell us how,
 man . They're either going to tell me, oh, I knew all of it, or they're going to tell
 me, there were parts that were on it that I never saw before. For instance, tenth
 grade students taking the math section get into geometry; well, a lot of them
 haven't had geometry yet, so it's very frustrating. This year we had our math
 teachers touch on geometry even in our Algebra 1A and 1 B classes to let them
 know, you might be seeing this on the test.

S: Are teachers given incentives for better student performance?

T: That's funny. The county I left down in Indian River, depending on your
 evaluation-if you were exemplary you had a chance to get a ten percent bonus-
 quite a bit of money. That had a lot to do with test scores and how you
 performed in the classroom and how your evaluations were. I'm not really sure
 we have that in place here, master teacher or any of those bonuses here. If we
 were to become an A-grade, there's a percentage of money we get from the
 state that we divide up as bonuses or however into whomever we want to