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.
About half as many students will qualify for Bright Futures scholarships when the school year begins this fall as did during the current year, according to new estimates from the Florida College Access Network.
That’s because lawmakers have steadily increased requirements for the primarily lottery-funded scholarships, raising minimum scores required on the SAT and ACT college entrance exams. Graduates must score at least 1170 on the SAT or 26 on the ACT to qualify for a scholarship this fall. That’s up from 970 on the SAT and 20 on the ACT in the 2008-2009 school year.
Florida College Access Network
The Florida College Access Network estimates about half as many students will qualify for Bright Futures this fall.
One in three high school graduates qualified for the scholarships in 2009. This fall, just one in eight graduates are estimated to meet new minimum required scores.
“The value and need for a highly skilled and educated workforce have been highly touted by our state’s leaders in Tallahassee this session,” Florida C.A.N.! senior researcher Troy Miller said in a statement. “If these sweeping cuts to financial aid are enforced as scheduled, our state will find itself at a competitive disadvantage.”
While both budgets would set a record for total state education spending, both budget fall short of the per-student high water mark of $7,126 set during the the 2007-2008 school year.
Schools are also likely to receive more money for maintenance after several years with almost nothing in the state budget to fix roofs, replace equipment and take care of other long-term repairs. The House budget includes $50 million for district school maintenance, while the Senate includes $40 million.
This is the second year New York has used a home-grown test to assess its Common Core standards. The protests started last year and seem to be picking up steam in 2014.
Advocates of “opting out” of New York’s tests estimate that parents have chosen to withhold more than 30,000 students from the tests this year. Chalkbeat reported the number of students opting out of state tests in New York City schools has increased to nearly 640, up from 276 last year. And advocates argue that number could exceed more than 1,000 students.
Jon Hage heads the for-profit charter school management company, Charter Schools USA (CSUSA), based in Fort Lauderdale. The company operates 58 schools in seven states across the country, including Florida.
Hage grew up in middle-class Oakland Park near Fort Lauderdale. He served in the United States Army, Army National Guard and Army Reserves as a commissioned officer in the Special Forces (Green Berets). After then doing policy work in Washington D.C. and Tallahassee, he founded CSUSA in 1997.
Q: What was your first job?
A: I was a custodian at Nova High School between 10th and 11th grade. I cleaned toilets, mopped floors and scraped the gum off the bottom of desks. This taught me early on to respect property (I still have a pet peeve of making sure kids don’t stick their gum under a desk!) and to never be too proud to do any task required of me.
Former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida speaking at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland.
Republicans should give former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush a chance if he decides to run for president in 2016 — despite his support of Common Core education standards — George Will writes in The Washington Post:
He will not, however, have the nomination handed to him on a silver salver. And the nomination fight would be especially bruising because Bush has been admirably forthright, but certainly impolitic, about two divisive issues — immigration and the Common Core national education standards for grades K through 12.
He wisely favors immigration reform responsive to the needs of the U.S. workforce and the realities of the 12 million who are not here legally but are neither going to “self-deport” or be deported. His enthusiasm for the Common Core is misplaced, but conservatives, in judging it, should judge Bush with a generosity he has earned by his exemplary record as an education reformer favoring school choice.
Unfortunately, there are too many Republicans who, honing their knives and lengthening their lists of unforgivable heresies, seem to derive more satisfaction from burning Republicans at the stake than from defeating Democrats. And there are too many other Republicans who think their task is to save the party from its base of principled activists.
Why? Bush could win more Hispanic votes or those in traditionally Democratic-voting states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Will argues.
The Foundation for Florida's Future is invoking Bill Murray, and that's the fact, Jack.
Foundation for Excellence in Education blogger Mike Thomas has responded to a post we wrote last week looking at the claims in a television ad running in Tampa. The ad references the state’s top 10 ranking in an Education Week survey, rising graduation rates and more students taking and passing Advanced Placement exams.
Our post noted Florida still has among the nation’s lowest graduation rate. Thomas argues Florida requirements are more difficult than other states:
Florida’s graduation rate of 75.6 percent is low compared to most other states. And we could increase that significantly overnight by simply waiving exit exams required for graduation.
The question then becomes: Do you dumb down standards and increase your numbers, producing graduates who can’t even read at a 10th grade level? Florida has found it can raise standards and increase graduation rates at the same time. This is a journey worth taking.
And Thomas lists a number of reasons why Florida’s policies to encourage students to take Advanced Placement exams are nothing but a success.
A classroom chart explaining the differences between claims, claim evidence and commentary. Hillsborough County schools are teaching the Three Cs as the building blocks of student writing.
Essays on Florida’s new writing test will be scored by a human and a computer, but the computer score will only matter if the score is significantly different from that of the human reviewer. If that happens, bid documents indicate the essay will be scored by another human reviewer.
University of Akron researcher Mark Shermis has studied the accuracy of automated essay scoring — computer programs which read essays and assign a score — in three trials. Shermis concluded the programs worked at least as well as human scorers in two of those trials.
An Australian trial of two automated essay scoring programs found machine-scored essays fell short of human grading on closed content driven writing prompts. But that trial used just one prompt and a small sample of essays.
A second trial, sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, tested eight commercial automated essay scoring programs and one developed by a university lab. the trial gathered more than 22,000 essays from eight writing prompts spread across six states.
The nine automated essay scoring programs performed on par with human scorers. The humans earned an accuracy score of .74, while the best of the automated essay scoring programs earned an accuracy score of .78. The machines scored particularly well on two data sets which included shorter, source-based essays.
“A few of them actually did better than human raters,” Shermis said.
Florida writing tests will be graded by a human and a computer program, according to bid documents for the new test. And just 2 percent of students will take a pencil and paper exam in 2015.
A computer program will grade student essays on the writing portion of the standardized test set to replace the FCAT, according to bid documents released by the Florida Department of Education.
The essays will be scored by a human and a computer, but the computer score will only matter if the score is significantly different from that of the human reviewer. If that happens, the documents indicate the essay will be scored by another human reviewer.
Florida writing tests are currently graded by two human scorers and the state has never used computerized grading on the exam.
The Florida Department of Education announced Monday it chose the non-profit American Institutes for Research to produce new tests tied to Florida’s Common Core-based math and language arts standards. Spokesmen for the agency and AIR said they had yet to sign a contract, were still working out the details and declined to comment about the specifics of the new test.
“It’s speculative at this point to think about what is on the assessments,” said Joe Follick, communications director for the Florida Department of Education.
But the bid documents show using computers to grade the state writing test will save $30.5 million over the course of the six-year, $220 million contract with AIR. The change was part of a list which trimmed more than $100 million from AIR’s initial proposal.
The ad serves two purposes: it argues Florida schools are improving, and that improvement is due to annual statewide testing, school grading and other policies promoted by former Gov. Jeb Bush. Bush founded the Foundation for Excellence in Education. The ads are tied to the 15th anniversary of Bush’s A+ education plan.
The ad is also part of a public relations campaign defending Common Core math and language arts standards fully adopted by Florida and 44 other states. Bush considers Common Core to be the continuation of the A+ plan and he has been advocating for the standards across the country.
So what does the ad claim? And is it accurate?
@StateImpactFL I hope you do some fact checking! That’s Jeb Bush’s foundation right there. #lies
“Florida is a top ten state” — This one struck us as odd, because the small print at the bottom of the screen attributes it to the U.S. Department of Education, the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Center for Education Statistics and the National Assessment of Educational Progress — none of whom issue one-to-50 rankings of state education systems.
Miami-Dade school superintendent Alberto Carvalho speaks with Michel Martin, host of NPR's Tell Me More, in 2012.
Miami-Dade schools superintendent Alberto Carvalho said the process by which Florida chose a new statewide exam was ‘insufficient’ and he questioned whether the test from the American Institutes for Research will be right for Florida. StateImpact Florida’s Sammy Mack caught up with Carvalho today.
In particular, Carvalho was concerned the exam would be field-tested in Utah — but not Florida — prior to use in Sunshine State schools.
“I don’t need to explain the differences between population diversity in Utah versus the state of Florida,” said Carvalho, who last month was named the national superintendent of the year by the School Superintendents Association. “So, I find it insufficient from a statistical perspective, from a fairness prospective and even, perhaps, a legal perspective with so much riding on this exam.”
Exam results contribute to everything from whether students are promoted to fourth grade from third grade or graduate high school, to teacher evaluations and pay and a school’s A-to-F grade.
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