Orange County school board member thinks FCAT replacement even harder

ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida's education system is changing and on Monday, the state released sample questions from the new way it plans on measuring students' success.

Instead of using the FCAT, the Florida Department of Education will be using Common Core standards.

Channel 9's Jorge Estevez sat down with Orange County school board member Rick Roach, who looked over the sample questions and found them to be more confusing than questions found previously on the FCAT.

Roach, who recently took the FCAT himself and failed, is not in favor of having any of the tests be the single measure to determine student achievement and teacher success.

"It is pretty much going to be a setup for failure for kids," he said.

The difference with the newly released sample questions is that it's even more in-depth testing, and Roach expects it to produce a higher fail rate.

"It is going to require a lot more work from a student to get the answer that the question is asking for," he said.

Critics feel the method is too hard and the added stress of the time limit is counterproductive.

"Now  you have answers in here with detractors and decoys all designed to trip kids up to get a predesigned failure rate," Roach said of the reading segment.

The writing section requires more in-depth writing, something Roach said isn’t indicative of a child's potential.

"This measures how fast a child can take an unfamiliar topic, write something with some kind of quality and turn it in in a certain amount of time," he said.

The math section teaches a new kind of math that is more about analytical reading than arithmetic.

"The old eight into 16 equals two. Now kids are required to show that two or three different ways," said Roach. "I am not sure why that is true."

WFTV