John O'Connor is the Miami-based education reporter for StateImpact Florida. John previously covered politics, the budget and taxes for The (Columbia, S.C) State. He is a graduate of Allegheny College and the University of Maryland.
Hackers stole unencrypted Social Security numbers and credit card info for current and former American Institutes of Research employees.
Hackers stole employee data earlier this month from the American Institutes for Research, the company chosen to produce Florida’s next standardized test.
No student information was stolen, according to Education Week. But, the hackers got Social Security numbers and credit card information for about 6,500 current and former employees.
“The breach only affected our business systems,” said Larry McQuillan, the organization’s director of public affairs. “By design, student data resides on an external information system independent from the domain that was affected.”
The Washington-based AIR has hundreds of contracts with federal, state, and local agencies, including the United States departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education, health and human services, and more, according to the group’s website. The organization has been a major provider of both online and pencil-and-paper assessments to districts and states, including Delaware, Minnesota, and Oregon.
AIR also has contracts with the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of two major multi-state consortia developing online assessments aligned to the new Common Core State Standards, and the organization provides educational program evaluation and value-added teacher evaluation services to a number of states and districts. It’s worth noting that AIR is currently embroiled in a dispute over a lucrative contract being awarded by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. (The executive vice president of AIR, Gina Burkhardt, is also a member of the board of Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week.)
Do traditional district schools receive more money than charter schools? A Rutgers University researcher says the gap is not as big when you compare actual expenses.
But that study only looked at revenue, argues Rutgers University researcher Bruce Baker in a new National Education Policy Center review, and ignores the complex financial relationships between school districts and charter schools. Public school districts often must pay for transportation, special education, food and other services for charter schools. Sometimes, the district receives money only to pass it on to a charter school.
Baker looked at how much traditional public schools and charter schools spend on students and found the gap was usually smaller than the University of Arkansas researchers found. In some places, such as Bridgeport, Connecticut, charters schools spent more per student than district schools.
“Simply put, the findings and conclusions of the study are not valid or useful,” Baker wrote.
This story is part of a series from The Hechinger Report and StateImpact Florida looking at how Florida schools are getting ready for Common Core standards. Read — and listen to — the first two stories here andhere.
It makes sense that Florida’s new K-12 math and language arts standards based on Common Core will mean changes for those classes.
But science, social studies – even gym classes – will also change when every grade starts using the standards this fall.
At Tampa’s Monroe Middle School, near MacDill Air Force base, science coach Janet Steuart said the standards are bringing changes to her classes too.
John O'Connor / StateImpact Florida
Monroe Middle School science teacher Andrea Groves works with a student. Many science classes will add more reading and writing assignments as Florida finishes the switch to new K-12 math and language arts standards this fall.
“There will be more emphasis on how you write in science,” Steuart said. “How you write with clarity. How you take a position; you defend it; you use evidence, pictures, text – whatever you have to defend it.”
Common Core outlines what students should know in math and English classes at the end of each grade. The emphasis on writing is the third, embedded set of standards within Common Core – literacy.
Common Core calls for students to read and write more outside of language arts classes. And they should pull evidence from their assignments to support their work.
That might mean more non-fiction books or reading historical or technical documents in addition to close readings of classic novels or poetry.
Steuart says there’s this writing assignment as an example.
“Defend the classification of the platypus as being a mammal,” she said. “What characteristics does it have that maybe it shouldn’t be? It lays eggs. So is there enough evidence that it should be a mammal or is there enough evidence that, no, we’ve got to revise that?”
For some districts the new emphasis on reading and writing will be a shock. A Common Core recommended reading list includes science texts about earthworms, the moon landing and Euclid’s treatise that is the basis of geometry.
But Hillsborough County schools have been adding reading and writing assignments to courses the past few years.
Seventh grade Civics teacher Tony Corbett says not much will change when Monroe Middle completes the switch to the new standards next school year.
“It just gives us 10 things to focus on that we’ve already been focusing on,” Corbett said. “They’re already supposed to be able to summarize. They’re already supposed to have vocabulary. They’re already supposed to do main idea. They’re already supposed to do primary documents. And that’s pretty much what the focus of Common Core is.”
Common Core will even mean changes for physical education classes. Teachers might need to work in math and writing assignments.
Some districts post vocabulary lists in the gym – or create math games.
It’s something Monroe Middle PE teacher Shane Knipple said he already does.
“We always try to integrate different subject areas as much as we can,” Knipple said. “A lot of science, and definitely a lot of math with scoring, counting and things of that nature.
Students running a mile outside on the track were calculating whether they were still on pace to finish in eight minutes.
Knipple said the changes Common Core will bring to PE classes are just good teaching.
“A lot of times in education they put things under different names when it’s something you’ve been doing all along,” he said. “True P.E. teachers that do what they’re supposed to do, I think we’re probably doing most of what we need to do already.
Monroe Middle gym teachers said they’ve been told more changes will happen over the next few years. But like teachers in other subjects, they’re confident they will be ready.
Many school districts don’t restrict contractors from using the data. And a federal privacy law was written prior to widespread Internet use and needs updating.
From the story:
Students shed streams of data about their academic progress, work habits, learning styles and personal interests as they navigate educational websites. All that data has potential commercial value: It could be used to target ads to the kids and their families, or to build profiles on them that might be of interest to employers, military recruiters or college admissions officers.
The law is silent on who owns that data. But Kathleen Styles, the Education Department’s chief privacy officer, acknowledged in an interview that much of it is likely not protected by FERPA — and thus can be commercialized by the companies that hold it.
Districts could write privacy protections into their contracts with ed tech companies. But few do.
A recent national study found that just 7 percent of the contracts between districts and tech companies handling student data barred the companies from selling it for profit.
The privacy concerns include big, new firms such as Knewton, and national non-profit efforts such as Code.org, which is encouraging kids to learn computer programming.
Students at the all-girls Ferrell Preparatory Academy in Tampa. Ariana Jerome, Shawna Kent, Elena Postlewait and Destiny Jackson all say they prefer their all-girls school to the co-ed schools they previously attended.
In the best-designed studies, Hyde found no evidence students benefit from single-gender education across 14 outcomes, including math performance, self-esteem, attitudes about math and science and more.
“Often it will work in the first year,” Hyde said, “because everybody’s enthusiastic about it. They recruit the best teachers, and so on. But after the first year, when the novelty wears off, it doesn’t really produce any benefits.”
Two new national studies raise questions about the how accurate modern teacher evaluations are.
The first study, from the University of Southern California’s Morgan Polikoff and the University of Pennsylvania’s Andrew Porter, finds test-based evaluation scores have little to no link to other teacher quality measures, such as how well instruction matches standards and the content of assessments. Their study included data from Hillsborough County schools in Florida.
The scores are known as a value-added model, and use a statistical formula to predict how well a student should score on standardized tests based on past performance. If the student scores higher or lower than predicted, that difference is attributed to the classroom teacher.
Florida Department of Education
After analyzing the first year of data, the Florida Department of Education believes the state's teacher evaluation formula is sound.
Florida law requires teachers are evaluated based on a combination of how much student test scores improve and in-class observations. Florida is one of a growing number of states which requires school districts to pay teachers based on their evaluations.
Lutz Elementary School teacher Mike Meiczinger uses Twitter to let people know what's happening in his class.
Lutz Elementary School teacher Mike Meiczinger noticed some parents weren’t using the class web site to keep track of what their students were doing.
So Meiczinger signed up for Twitter as another way to keep in touch. He still feels like a novice, but Meiczinger sees it as an instant messaging service for parents.
“I always tell my parents the child can never come home and say ‘Oh, we did nothing today,'” Meiczinger said. “That’s why I use it, so the parents know what’s new and fresh with the kids.”
We sat down with Senate Education Committee Chairman John Legg to talk about the recently completed legislative session.
Legg said it was a good year for schools, with the budget boosting per student funding and lawmakers adding more options for students who want to earn college credit while still in high school.
On the year’s most controversial proposal — expanding the private school tax credit scholarship program — Legg said the Senate gave up on its idea to require those students take the same statewide standardized test as public school students. But the final bill does require more auditing and should provide more data to assess how well the program is working.
Legg also talked about a proposal to make it easier for charter schools to open and what influence, if any, the governor’s race had on lawmaker decisions. Below are excerpts from the interview.
Q: You guys wrapped up the legislative session last week. You’re chairman of the education committee. I’m going to start — just give me a summary of what happened with education during the session?
A: It was a good year for education this year. We took on some big reforms, but what we did was the reforms that we did were based at the district level. We’ve allowed for some stability to take place, but also made adjustments on reforms that we’ve done over the last decade dealing with school grading, dealing with some acceleration. But all in all, it was a year of stability and a year of increased funding.
Just 19 percent of Florida 12th graders were considered “proficient” on the 2013 math exam, according to test results. NAEP defines proficient as students who show solid academic performance for their grade, including competency over challenging subject matter.
Nationally, 26 percent of students achieved proficient or higher on the exam.
Reading scores were a little better. Thirty-six percent of Florida students scored proficient or above on the 2013 exam. The national rate was 38 percent.
Florida students showed no statistical improvement since the last time the exam was administered in 2009.
Hillsborough County teachers Julie Hiltz and Jaraux Washington cooked up the idea to push back against the idea that teachers are glorified baby-sitters and share what the job is really like.
Teachers are posting photos, testimonials, anecdotes and other insights from the classroom. You can listen to three Florida teachers talk about what teaching is below. And here are some of our favorite #TeachingIs tweets, after the jump:
StateImpact seeks to inform and engage local communities with broadcast and online news focused on how state government decisions affect your lives. Learn More »
