From The Tallahassee Democrat: “According to the Florida Department of Education, more students statewide are writing at or above grade level.” (The results are here.)

It’s great that Florida continues to concentrate on improving its students’ writing skills, but can FCAT writing scores really be an accurate depiction of Sunshine State youngsters’ sentence-crafting abilities, especially when the data are compared one year to the next? The larger question: Is it possible to accurately assess writing in a statewide, high-stakes test?