I first realized the power I have as a journalist while covering education in Oakland.
I was part of a team that created a radio documentary on the public school system. Our work compelled listeners to donate toward filling the food cabinet of a teacher struggling to feed her hungry students. And one listener offered a college-bound senior living with her drug addicted mother paid tuition. Our work provoked listeners to act. From that moment, I aspired to always generate such movement through journalism.
My motivation as a journalist and sociologist is to be a catalyst for social change through “people reporting” and data analysis.
As noted this morning, the Florida Education Association has filed a lawsuit challenging a state constitutional amendment allowing public money to pay for private school tuition vouchers. From the Palm Beach Post:
The proposed constitutional amendment would effectively lift a century-old provision, dubbed the “Blaine Amendment,” which prohibits tax dollars from directly or indirectly going to religious organizations.
Millions of state dollars are budgeted each year for programs serving foster children, inmates, and low-income and elderly Floridians that are run by religious-affiliated organizations. Supporters of the amendment say they are merely looking to clarify state law, to avoid putting these services at risk.
Florida’s Blaine amendment first gained prominence during the 2006 challenge to the state’s private school voucher program. The First District Court of Appeal ruled that then-Gov. Jeb Bush’s first-in-the-nation statewide program violated the no-aid provision.
Reading Monday’s RAND Corporation study of New York City’s scrapped teacher merit pay system sounded an awful lot like an interview we had last week with Orange County Superintendent Ronald Blocker and his district’s experience with pay-for-performance last decade.
Like all Florida school districts, Orange County is designing a state-mandated merit pay system that bases half a teacher’s performance on standardized testing scores. But Blocker told us his district’s trial run that paid teachers an incentive to work in high-need schools — typically the poorest and lowest-performing schools — did not work.
The reasons Blocker cited were similar to failings in New York City that RAND identified: Teachers did not believe in the system, in part, because they are motivated by more than pay. Blocker said teaching is a calling, and that teachers who do not want to work in troubled schools are not likely to do so because they could earn up to $6,000 more each year.
“Merit pay wasn’t very popular,” Blocker said. “They would work there until they achieved tenure, then they would find some reason to work at a school closer to their home.
“Whatever made you unhappy in the first place is still there, and I think that’s where merit pay misses it. It doesn’t tap the missionary zeal in that teacher.”
States may be wasting time and money attempting to pay teachers based on student performance, undermining a new Florida law requiring merit pay in schools statewide.
Performance-based bonuses neither improve student test scores, nor are the most effective way to motivate educators concluded a RAND Corporation study of a New York City merit pay program.
New York City schools decided to end the three-year program Sunday, which has paid $56 million in bonuses to teachers at more than 200 schools. Florida lawmakers have required school districts to create teacher evaluation and merit pay systems by 2014, and merit pay is favored by federal education officials.
But the RAND study says merit pay failed because teachers did not buy in for a number of reasons:
While the headline of this morning’s state Board of Education meeting was Miami-Dade and Duval county schools getting another year to turn around struggling schools, the takeaway was a conversation about shortcomings in the way Florida judges troubled schools.
The problem is the state expects more once schools are classified as troubled, school officials said, making it more difficult to overcome the higher bar and pull themselves off of state watch lists.
You’ve found Florida’s new source for statewide education coverage. Here’s what we’re planning.
StateImpact Florida is a new project from National Public Radio and Florida public media with an emphasis on in-depth and investigative reporting.
Florida has been a leader in education reform for more than a decade and is now exporting those ideas to the rest of the nation, led by ambassadors such as former Gov. Jeb Bush. But which ideas have worked and which have not?
Is standardized testing really the best way to measure student performance?
Will paying teachers based on that testing produce better teachers and smarter students?
How the rising price of higher education affects who is getting into and graduating from state colleges.
How are schools, community colleges and universities dealing with smaller budgets and larger student rolls?
Sarah Gonzalez will be in the classroom and community, watching those policies in practice. I’ll be in the data, analyzing test results, graduation rates, budgets and contracts. StateImpact Florida will put education reform to the test.
The goal is both broadcast and online stories that gauge the impact — it’s right there in our name — of state and local education policies on students, parents, teachers, districts and the politicians and others influencing those decisions.
StateImpact seeks to inform and engage local communities with broadcast and online news focused on how state government decisions affect your lives. Learn More »
