Miami-Dade superintendent Alberto Carvalho pointed to Florida Comprehensive Writing Test results as an example. Miami-Dade students scores rose this year, he said, but schools will get less credit according to the school grading formula. That’s because the state raised the target score from a 3 to a 3.5.
That’s difficult to explain to parents and students, Carvalho said.
“At stake here is the credibility of the accountability system — we have a chance to fix it,” he said. “Number one: Put in place and continue the one letter grade drop provision.”
Nikolai Vitti has been superintendent of Duval County Public Schools since November 2012.
Vitti arrived in North Florida last November, leaving behind a job as chief academic officer for Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
On the surface, Miami-Dade and Duval represent two very different kinds of Florida school districts. There are nearly 350,000 public school students in Miami-Dade—close to two thirds of them are Hispanic, nearly a quarter are black. The Duval school system has about 125,000 students, 44% of whom are black and 39% of whom are white.
Vitti sat down with StateImpact Florida to talk about the transition from South Florida to North Florida—and what he learned during his first school year on the job.
“They’re great standards. They’re higher level standards. They’re common sense,” Ford said. “They allow teachers and students to dive deep into the subject matter as opposed to covering a variety of issues very, very thinly.”
But he’d like more time for students and teachers to make the transition.
“Teachers are going to have to have time to retool absolutely everything they’ve been doing because these standards are so much better,” Ford said, “but they’re higher level and they require different ways of teaching.”
P.G. Schafer, a Tea Party member, holds a sign to protest Common Core across the street from Marion Technical Institute where school administrators were meeting on Southeast Fort King Street in Ocala, Fla. on Wednesday, April 3, 2013.
Laura Zorc, an organizer with the group, says the goal is to convince the legislature to approve a bill which would delay Common Core implementation so it can be studied. Zorc also wants a study to determine whether the standards violate the state constitution or U.S. Constitution.
The hotel is hosting a national two-day training session on the Common Core State Standards.
Florida is one of 45 states which have adopted the English, literacy and math standards. They are scheduled to be fully implemented in Florida schools in the fall of 2014.
Sanders-Clyde Elementary School in Charleston, S.C.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
There are some real perils to systems which try to reduce teacher performance to a single number, such as many of our new “value-added” formulas.
The first is that whatever you decide to measure — and, implicitly or explicitly reward — is what you are going to get.
Take a look back a few years at our mortgage crisis. One of the precipitating structural problems was that the system evolved so that there was an incentive to write more mortgages. No longer were people rewarded for responsible lending. They were rewarded for the amount of loans they produced. We all know what happened. More mortgages!
It didn’t matter that many properties and property owners were bad risks. The measurement drove the production. So you have to be very careful in deciding what to measure.
When we narrowly define increased test scores as the “value” teachers add to students, then that is what schools will work towards.
Progress Florida says ALEC has too much influence inside state houses. ALEC defended its work.
Two groups named yesterday in a report which criticizes ALEC – the American Legislative Exchange Council – for its “damaging influence” on public education policy have responded.
The organization has a series of task forces comprised of legislators that “develop model policies to use across the country.” Subjects range from Civil Justice to Communications and Technology.
The report claims ALEC’s task forces are under the influence of corporate interests.
“The policies of ALEC’s Education Task Force prioritize profit over results, secrecy over accountability, and cuts over kids,” the report states.
Lindsay Russell, director of ALEC’s Task Force on Education, sent StateImpact Florida this statement: Continue Reading →
A new study finds Florida district school students learn more in reading than charter school students.
Seven days learning.
That’s how much more Florida’s traditional public school students learned in reading compared to students in charter schools, according to a new national study of charter school performance.
In math, Florida charter school students were even with their traditional public school peers.
The study updates a landmark 2009 review of charter school performance which concluded district schools outperformed charter schools.
This time, the average charter school students gained eight additional days of reading reading than district school students while math gains were even.
The American Legislative Exchange Council – better known as ALEC – describes itself as a non-profit, non-partisan organization that focuses on policy relating to “free markets, limited government and constitutional division of powers between the federal and state governments.”
Miami-Dade high school advanced calculus teacher Orlando Sarduy writes out the formula that will grade and help determine the pay of Florida teachers.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
The new term of art within the educational conversation about how we sort the good teachers from the bad is “value added.”
We stole the phrase from economics. But in the educational context, it brings to mind the great George Orwell quote: “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
We now throw this term around a lot. The mathematical formulas designed to identify the effect an individual teacher is having on an individual student are called “value-added” models. Administrators, researchers and policy-makers speak of the “value added” by a particular teacher — the difference in a student’s learning between excellent, good and poor teachers.
And, Orwell was right. It sure is making us foolish.
The transition to Common Core may be a challenge that some teachers choose not to take.
Before she retires, Shara Holt is getting teachers around the state ready to use Common Core standards. Holt is a literacy coach in St. Johns County who’s spent 41 years as an educator.
It’s a new way of teaching that focuses heavily on fewer subjects, sets benchmarks for students at each grade level, and forces students to explain their answers.
“Gone are the days when a teacher can go to the filing cabinet and pull out a lesson plan from five years ago, blow the dust off and use the same lesson plan,” said Holt. “Now we have to look at the needs of the students…instead of just teaching what’s there and (saying) ‘If they get it, fine – if they don’t get it, too bad.'”
It’s a change that Holt thinks could lead to an exodus from the classroom.
“I’ve seen teachers already who have left the system,” Holt said, “not only because of the change coming with Common Core but also with the teacher evaluation system.”
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