No Child Left Behind Act
Reacting to Federal Guidelines, the state of Florida, which has been highlighted as a role model for student testing by the Bush Administration's Department of Education has released the following memo:
In response to President Bush's Federal No Child Left Behind Act, students will have to pass a new test to be promoted to the next grade level. In the hopes that it will be uniformly adopted by all the states, thus elevating Florida to a glorious front runner position in education, it will be called: the Federal Arithmetic and Reading Test (FART).
All students who cannot pass a FART in the second grade will be retested in grades 3-5 until such a time as they are capable of achieving a FART score of 80%. If a student does not successfully FART by grade 5, that student shall be placed in a separate English program, the Special Mastery Elective for Learning Language (SMELL).
If with this increased SMELL program the student still cannot pass the required FART, he or she can graduate to middle school by taking a one-semester course in Comprehensive Reading and Arithmetic Preparation (CRAP).
If by age fourteen the student cannot FART, SMELL or CRAP, he will earn his promotion in an intensive one-week seminar entitled the Preparatory Reading for Unprepared Nationally Exempted Students (PRUNES).
It is the opinion of the Florida Department of Public Instruction that an intensive week of PRUNES will enable any student to pass a FART, SMELL and CRAP.
This revised provision of the student-testing component of the House Bill 110 should help "clear the air".