The study shows that unemployment was down for nearly every category of majors in 2012, the only exception being communications and journalism.
Science and engineering grads had the lowest unemployment rate — most around five percent.
Architecture and social sciences had the highest unemployment rates — around 10 percent. Those rates are almost the same as for experienced workers with just a high school diploma.
But while the job market is recovering from the Great Recession, salaries are not. The Georgetown researchers say pay won’t fully recover from the recession until 2017.
Academy Prep in St. Petersburg is a private middle school that only enrolls low-income students.
It’s 7:30 a.m. and the fifth through eight graders at Academy Prep in midtown St. Petersburg are lined up outside to recite the school pledge. It’s a cool February morning and they’re a little fidgety until Head of School Gina Burkett raises two fingers above her head and all goes quiet.
The pledge starts with “ Standing in this room are the greatest, most committed, most responsible people this world has ever known.”
That may sound slightly immodest but getting these kids to believe they are capable of great things is a big part of the curriculum here.
You see, Academy Prep is a private middle school exclusively for children whose families live below the poverty level and it is paid for entirely with corporate and private donations. It’s in one of the poorest areas of Pinellas County.
The school was started 17 years ago when the owners of a local resort overheard their employees talking about the problems their kids were having in the local public school.
So, using their own money and private donations they, along with some retired educators started this not-for-profit school in the heart of one of St. Petersburg’s most troubled neighborhoods.
They had to add fractions to find a total for the amount of cake or glasses of apple juice students consumed.
Then, they had to divide the total to find the average.
Along the way, the students frequently took a peek at charts hanging around the room. Called anchor charts, these diagrams were drawn by students in the other 5th grade class and laid out each of the steps they used to create a line plot.
As Miami-Dade schools have switched to Florida’s Common Core-based math standards anchor charts are an important addition to classrooms, said Michelle White, who directs math instruction for the school district.
“It tells a learning story,” White said. “When you walk in I can look at anchor charts and see what concepts have been covered.”
But another lesson was happening on the other side of the class, one tailored for each student using i-Ready computerized instruction.
i-Ready tests each student, identifies the concepts which he or she is struggling with and then delivers lessons, games and other activities to help the student master them. And this can all happen without the teacher’s help.
Salazar divided her class in half. While students worked in groups on line plots, the rest of the class worked by themselves on i-Ready lessons.
Working with just a dozen students — instead of 24 — allowed Salazar to spend more time with each on the complicated line plot lesson, which included more math concepts than usual. Salazar planned to switch the two groups the next day.
Education Commissioner Pam Stewart has recommended eliminating a high school exam, making another optional and asking state lawmakers and local school districts to cut back on the amount of testing.
Stewart’s recommendations are the conclusion of a statewide review of standardized testing requested by Gov. Rick Scott.
“There is, without a doubt, an excess of testing in Florida schools,” Stewart said in a statement, saying she’ll work with Scott, lawmakers and school districts to “strike the appropriate balance between accountability and instruction.”
As schools switch to the Common Core standards, long-running teaching debates are becoming more public.
One of the by-products of states around the country adopting Common Core is that the standards have brought attention to long-running education debates that aren’t about money or testing.
As we noted in the story, many of these “new” techniques schools are adding have been around a while. And math educators have spent years debating the best ways to teach math.
Journalist Elizabeth Green cataloged what some argue are deficiencies in math education in a New York Times Magazine story headlined: “Why Do Americans Stink At Math?”
Escambia County school board member Jeff Bergosh is leading the new school boards group.
School board members dissatisfied with the statewide association who represents them are forming their own group, the Fort Myers News-Press and others report.
The Florida Coalition of School Board Members seeks to become a “financially responsible,” grassroots group that supports school choice options including charter school and local control of education issues.
“One of our responsibilities as a school board is to partner with the state… however, it’s become very clear that the school boards are really losing influence in Tallahassee,” said [Erika] Donalds, who was elected to the Collier school board in November. “We feel the FSBA has kind of lost touch.”
Frances S. Tucker Elementary School fifth grade math teacher Yaliesperanza Salazar leads her class through an exercise to group data on a line graph.
At dinner tables across Florida, parents and their elementary school children are trying to solve a math problem: What’s going on with my kid’s homework?
Florida is one of dozens of states that has switched to new math standards based on Common Core. The standards outline what students should know in every grade.
Experts say it means big changes to how math is taught. More focus on understanding concepts and solving problems multiple ways. Less memorization of formulas and grinding out worksheets full of similar problems.
Math is a constant conversation for Jessica Knopf and her fifth-grader, Natasha.
They talk about math at the dinner table. They send questions and answers by phone. They sought tutoring in online videos.
“When this Common Core stuff starting coming home,” Knopf says, “it wasn’t something I could just scribble and go ‘Oh, here it is.’ No. I had to stop. I had to think about it. I had to go online to Khan Academy. I had to bring my husband in. It wasn’t logical.”
Florida lawmakers want to limit the amount of time students spend testing.
A proposal to limit students to 45 hours of testing a year is unlikely to reduce the amount of time spent on exams, according to a survey of Florida’s largest school districts.
Districts say they don’t currently track the time individual students spend on testing.
Calculating the number is complicated. The amount of testing varies by a student’s grade, the classes he or she is taking and other factors, such as whether the student is learning English or receives extra time to accommodate a disability.
Orange and Miami-Dade county schools provided estimates and say even if a student were to take every test available in a single year, the student still would not exceed 45 hours of testing.
For instance, the district says a Miami-Dade eleventh grader has 20.6 hours of required tests. If the student took every eleventh grade test possible that would add 15.2 hours. And two International Baccalaureate courses — an advanced program for motivated students — would add eight more hours.
That’s a total of 43.8 hours of testing — and most students don’t take that course load.
Schools must earn at least 25 points out of 50 on the scoring scale to be eligible for a slice of the new funding. But the three lowest-scoring universities do not receive new money, even if they receive a score of more than 25 points.
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