University of Central Florida elementary education students discuss how to incorporate books, maps, magazines and other materials into lesson plans.
Editor’s note: This post was authored by Sarah Butrymowicz with The Hechinger Report.
Lee-Anne Spalding’s Elementary School Social Studies class at the University of Central Florida had spread out over the room in small groups.
One group of sophomore college students huddled over a set of poetry books, picking out ones they liked. Others gathered around the white board as Spalding demonstrated how to they could embed sounds in their presentations. Spalding had cut into strips a timeline of the civil rights movement and a third group, sitting on the floor, was putting the events back into chronological order.
In part, Spalding was providing content to her students by introducing them to materials they might use – like National Geographic magazines and the poetry books. But she was also modeling teaching strategies, like small group learning, and introducing activities, like the timeline exercise, that she hoped her students would someday mimic.
“You are more likely to use the instructional strategies I’m proposing to you if you actually do it,” she told her students.
UCF is the largest producers of teachers in the state; the university’s education school enrolls more than 2,000 students. It prides itself on being one of the strongest—if not the strongest—teacher training program in Florida, a position it has gained, school officials say, by nimbly responding to changes in the profession. But there is no real way to test that claim. The university, like many education schools across the country, often must rely on anecdotal evidence from principals and graduates to determine that its programs are working, rather than hard data showing students are performing better.
Conventional wisdom holds that many, if not most, education schools are doing a poor job at training teachers; after all, they have a history of taking in some of the lowest performing students, and student achievement in the United States has stagnated. Nationally, education schools have been criticized for being far too easy and, as a result, pumping ill-equipped teachers into the system and harming student achievement. Schools across the country are trying to mitigate the criticism by changing curriculum or increasing the amount of field experience teachers receive.
Florida and several other states are also creating accountability systems so education schools will develop quantitative ways to measure their programs’ success. But for now, teacher preparation remains over-saturated with options―undergraduate degrees, master’s programs, in-school residencies and online courses―that provide little evidence of their effectiveness. And as thousands of Florida’s baby boomer teachers prepare to retire, there is little consensus about how to best train the next generation of teachers.
TaxWatch bills itself as an “independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit public policy research institute and government watchdog.” The group targets 107 items for veto, including some education-related projects.
Just because a project is labeled as a “turkey,” doesn’t mean it’s not a worthwhile expenditure.
“What we’re looking for is that they followed the established budget processes, that the things that were funded were subject to public scrutiny,” said TaxWatch’s Robert Weissert. “That’s not a judgement of the value of the project.”
In other words, these turkeys didn’t go through the normal debate process among lawmakers or the public may not have had a chance to review them.
Here is a sampling of this year’s TaxWatch education turkeys:
Teacher's unions around the country are waiting and watching the Florida Education Association's challenge of the state teacher evaluation law.
The Florida Education Association’s lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state’s test-based teacher evaluations — if successful — could become a model for teacher’s union across the country, Governing magazine reports.
And over at the Quick and the Ed, labor attorney Danny Rosenthal argues the FEA normally would have a difficult time proving the government violated teachers’ 14th Amendment rights. But one of the teachers filing the Florida case was evaluated using students at a different school — a “striking fact” the union has on its side, Rosenthal writes.
The decision could have national implications by setting off a chain reaction of lawsuits testing other teacher evaluation provisions, he says.
Florida districts have yet to develop end-of-course exams for subjects such as art, music or physical education. So some districts used school-wide averages on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test for those teachers. That meant teachers were being rated for the performance of many students they had never taught.
Next month would have been Saunders’ three-year anniversary as president.
While the university is showcasing her string of accomplishments, there was no way to get around a spate of missteps in recent months.
“There is no doubt the recent controversies have been significant and distracting to all members of the University community,” Saunders said in her resignation letter.
“The issues and the fiercely negative media coverage have forced me to reassess my position as the President of FAU,” Saunders wrote. “I must make choices that are the best for the University, me and my family.”
The Republican Party of Florida has released two new Web videos to defend Gov. Rick Scott’s record on education.
The first is a compilation of news stories about Scott’s statewide tour celebrating his successful push to include teacher raises for the budget year beginning July 1.
Republicans turned against former Gov. Charlie Crist shortly after he greeted President Obama in 2009 and accepted federal stimulus money. Crist is now a Democrat and contemplating a run for governor.
Charlie Crist isn’t officially a Democratic candidate for governor — yet.
Crist made it clear both K-12 and higher education would be front and center if he runs. Teachers would not forget that Gov. Rick Scott came into office cutting education, Crist said, despite Scott’s support for teacher raises this year.
From his speech:
There’s just a couple of issues I want to share and talk with you about, and it starts with education. It starts with education because education is our most important civil right. It really is.
If we don’t fight for our public school teachers, if we don’t fight for our universities…then we’ve lost our way.
Now we have a governor that came into office and one of the first things he did was cut $1.4 billion dollars from education. And then he thinks that, you know this past session, you give a bonus to teachers — I’ve got news for him: Teachers are smart and cannot be bought.
A 2009 recording shows online educator K12 had difficulty hiring properly certified teachers in Florida. A draft state investigation found no evidence the company used teachers who were not Florida-certified, but used three teachers who were not subject certified.
State law requires teachers are certified in their subject area and by the state.
So when a K12 teacher saw her name listed on company documents as teaching Florida classes she had not taught, she asked her managers about it.
During a November 2009 conference call, the managers called it a mistake they were fixing. The recording was provided by a source and none of the participants were in states which require permission to record a phone call.
Allison Cleveland, K12’s vice president of school management and services, tried to assuage concerns that teacher certifications were used without that teacher’s knowledge.
“Well I think the important thing about Florida – you are not actually teaching in Florida,” she said on the tape. “You have not had any contact with students in Florida. I mean your name being on that list was nothing but a mistake. And, it took us a couple of days to get to the bottom of that…you know, and I feel like we’ve been able to resolve it.”
Company managers held a series of phone calls with staff to explain the situation, including admitting that a teacher’s name showed up on a roster of Florida teachers by mistake.
The phone call was recorded and provided to the Florida Department of Education Office of Inspector General as part of an investigation into whether K12 used properly certified teachers in Seminole County.
Listen to the entire conversation between Allison Cleveland, vice president of school management and services Julie Frein, senior director of the K12 Educator Group, and K12 teacher Laura Creach.
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