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.
That’s not the tagline for a new documentary about the Common Core State Standards, but it could be based on a trailer posted online.
The documentary, “Building The Machine,” is scheduled for a February release and features many prominent critics. That includes Sandra Stotsky and Ze’ev Wurman, who testified at a series of Florida public meetings on the standards in October.
The trailer also features footage of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is a prominent Common Core advocate.
Welcome to Florida, where all the teachers are above-average.
Why are we doing this again?
That’s a question people are asking around the state after seeing the second statewide batch of teacher evaluation data this week.
Nearly 98 percent of teachers earned ratings of “highly effective” or “effective.” And the percentage of teachers earning the top rating increased to one in three statewide from one in five teachers the prior year.
“Across the state, 98 percent of teachers rank in the top two categories — a figure that should be reassuring,” they wrote. “Yet the high number of failing schools — despite all those “highly effective” teachers — continues to be troublesome.”
The Florida Department of Education released some administrator evaluation data for the 2012-13 school year on Dec. 3. The evaluations were required by a 2011 law. Continue reading →
The Florida Department of Education released some teacher evaluation data for the 2012-13 school year on Dec. 3. The evaluations were required by a 2011 law. Continue reading →
The Florida Department of Education released some teacher evaluation data for the 2012-13 school year on Dec. 3. The evaluations were required by a 2011 law. Continue reading →
About one-third of teachers earned the top rating of “highly effective,” up from 23 percent of teachers last year. About 66 percent were rated “effective,” the largest category this year.
And the percentage of teachers earning the lowest ratings declined. This year, 1.4 percent of teachers were rated “needs improvement.” Last year 2.1 percent of teachers earned a “needs improvement rating.
Just two of every 1,000 teachers were rated “unsatisfactory,” about the same rate as last year.
About 14 percent of teachers have yet to be rated.
The PISA exam is given to 15-year-olds once every three years.
The latest U.S. results on an international math, science and reading test are ‘sobering,’ experts said, and show the average U.S. student continues to lose ground against those around the globe.
Overall, the U.S. finished 17th in reading, 21st in science and 26th in math. That’s largely because U.S. scores were flat while other countries raised their scores.
Locally, the results on the Program for International Student Assessment show the average Florida student scored about the same as the average U.S. student in science and reading. However, Florida average math scores trailed the U.S. average.
And in all three subjects, Florida had a lower percentage of top-scoring students than Massachusetts and Connecticut and had a higher percentage of low-performing students than those states.
Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, told NPR the results show the U.S. needs to make some big changes to its education system. Improving countries, such as Vietnam, are not as tradition-bound as the U.S.
“The current education reform agenda in the United States has not worked,” Tucker said.
This year’s PISA results will break out the performance of U.S. states, so that we might know how Florida matches up with the rest of the world. PISA is also useful because researchers analyze common trends among the top-performing countries to figure out which policies might have more impact on student performance.
Nine states are worried about testing students twice and are asking the federal Department of Education to loosen NCLB requirements.
States granted exemptions from the federal No Child Left Behind law are asking for more time to get ready for new teacher evaluation rules and to not have to test students twice on both new standards and outgoing standards, according to Education Week.
A dozen states have asked for more time to prepare for new teacher evaluation rules. Nine states are worried about having to test students twice — once to field test new multi-state exams tied to Common Core standards and once using existing state assessments.
Florida is not among either group of states, but the decision could be relevant. How states decide to measure school and teacher performance while making the switch to the Common Core math and English standards and accompanying testing is the next big debate over the standards:
States including Maryland, Kentucky, and North Carolina want to delay, by one year, tying teacher evaluations to teacher personnel decisions. That’s something federal officials offered back in June as states struggled to implement new common standards, new tests, and high-stakes teacher-rating systems that tie personnel decisions to student growth. Under No Child Left Behind Act waivers, states were originally supposed to implement new evaluation systems and tie them to personnel decisions, such as firings and tenure, by the 2015-16 school year. The added flexibility, dubbed “waiver-waivers,” would allow states to have until 2016-17.
The other nine states seeking the evaluation waiver-waivers are: Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, and Washington.
The double-testing waiver allows states to suspend some of their current tests and give only the field tests from the common-testing consortia—to avoid double testing students. The 15 states that are seeking this waiver, which is open to non-NCLB-waiver states, are: California, Connecticut Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Vermont, and Washington.
More than half of Maryland students with disabilities or learning English didn't count towards the state's NAEP results. Florida excluded 12 percent of those students.
More than half of Maryland students with disabilities or learning English tested don’t count towards the Old Line State’s results on a key national standardized exam, according toThe Washington Post.
Maryland excludes the results of 62 percent of learning-disabled and English learners on the fourth grade National Assessment of Educational Progress reading exam. The state excludes 60 percent of those same students on the eighth grade reading exam. Both are the highest rates in the country.
NAEP recommends states not exclude more than 15 percent of student results. The national average is 12 percent. The NAEP reading and math exams are given every two years to a sample of students across the country.
Maryland officials say they allow a person or computer to read text aloud to those students on their annual exams. NAEP does not allow that accommodation, so the scores are not counted.
Florida excluded 12 percent of students with disabilities and those learning English from the 2013 NAEP results. Florida does not allow the “read aloud” accommodation on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.
As the Post report, the change has a significant effect on Maryland’s score — especially compared to other states:
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