So, my first suggestion is that those Florida educators who are dissatisfied with the state's current school-grading system cooperatively develop (at the district, regional, or statewide level) a more defensible method of grading Florida's schools.  There are many legitimate indicators of a school's quality.  Test scores, certainly, must be an important component.  But there are other sorts of tests than that represented by the FCAT.  And there are numerous non-test variables that even skeptics will regard as credible.
   For example, suppose a school's staff collected anonymously supplied student responses to attitudinal inventories that, over the course of a school year, showed students' interest in learning had increased as well as their confidence in being able to read or to present oral reports.  Such evidence, if carefully gathered, is one important indicator that the school's staff is performing well.
   Or imagine that a school's staff had collected start-of-year and end-of-year writing samples, coded students' responses so the pretests could not be distinguished from the posttests, mixed them together, then had the writing samples evaluated by parents.  If such blind-scored writing samples indicated that students' skills had substantially improved, in other words, the pretest-to-posttest data showed that teachers were really helping children learn how to write well, that's clear evidence of a school's success.
   And, of course, there are other non-test indicators such as reductions in absenteeism, tardiness, and vandalism.  Important variables similar to these could be judiciously incorporated in an improved school-grading system.
   The point I'm trying to make is that it is professionally irresponsible to reject any kind of school-grading model.  But, after thoughtful consideration, significant improvements can be suggested for Florida's school-grading program.  Actually, given the wretched quality of the