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.
However, the Council of Chief State School Officers is asking for some wiggle room from the U.S. Department of Education from No Child Left Behind requirements — or the waivers from the law granted to states such as Florida — during the transition.
The standards have been fully adopted by Florida, 44 other states and the District of Columbia. Common Core lays out what students are expected to know in math and English language arts by the end of each grade.
The standards streamline the number of topics schools teach children in each subject. Common Core also requires teachers ask students what they know and to prove how they know it.
Researcher Matthew Di Carlo takes a second look at just how much improvement there was on Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test writing scores this year.
But the average fourth grade score improved only slightly. The percentage of fourth graders scoring 3.0 or better, the expectation prior to last year, improved by just two percentage points.
Editor’s note: This post was authored by Sarah Butrymowicz with The Hechinger Report.
Somewhere midway through his sophomore year of college at Florida Atlantic University, Christopher Clevenger started to question his aeronautical engineering major. He liked the coursework, and was doing well at it, but when he thought about his job prospects, the future seemed bleak.
“It would be me, a computer screen and a phone,” he said. “I didn’t get that human interaction that I craved.”
John O'Connor / StateImpact Florida
University of Central Florida education professor Lee-Anne Spalding uses an interactive white board to shows students how to connect a drill using coins to both math and history. Critics say education programs, such as the one at UCF, have few standards for entry and do not adequately prepare graduates to lead a classroom.
So Clevenger changed track. He was accepted in Nova Southeastern University’s undergraduate teacher training program. On a campus tour, talking with professors and seeing the level of interest they seemed to have in the teacher candidates, Clevenger was sold. He graduated from Nova in November with a degree in secondary social science and is now teaching world history at a high school near Nova’s Fort Lauderdale campus.
Although he switched from a tough major to one that has a reputation of being easy, he stressed that – despite what some people assume―the decision was not because he wanted to earn easy As.
“A lot of students see going into the education world as a fallback…That’s where you get the bad teachers,” he said. “It’s definitely not easy. It’s not something you wake up and do if you’re not passionate about it.”
A national push to improve the quality of teachers has focused largely on those already in the classroom, with the adoption of new teacher evaluation systems and efforts to help struggling teachers and push out those who don’t improve. But increasingly, reformers who believe better teachers will lead to greater student achievement are eyeing how teachers are trained in the first place—and finding training programs lacking.
University of Central Florida elementary education students discuss how to incorporate books, maps, magazines and other materials into lesson plans.
Editor’s note: This post was authored by Sarah Butrymowicz with The Hechinger Report.
Lee-Anne Spalding’s Elementary School Social Studies class at the University of Central Florida had spread out over the room in small groups.
One group of sophomore college students huddled over a set of poetry books, picking out ones they liked. Others gathered around the white board as Spalding demonstrated how to they could embed sounds in their presentations. Spalding had cut into strips a timeline of the civil rights movement and a third group, sitting on the floor, was putting the events back into chronological order.
In part, Spalding was providing content to her students by introducing them to materials they might use – like National Geographic magazines and the poetry books. But she was also modeling teaching strategies, like small group learning, and introducing activities, like the timeline exercise, that she hoped her students would someday mimic.
“You are more likely to use the instructional strategies I’m proposing to you if you actually do it,” she told her students.
UCF is the largest producers of teachers in the state; the university’s education school enrolls more than 2,000 students. It prides itself on being one of the strongest—if not the strongest—teacher training program in Florida, a position it has gained, school officials say, by nimbly responding to changes in the profession. But there is no real way to test that claim. The university, like many education schools across the country, often must rely on anecdotal evidence from principals and graduates to determine that its programs are working, rather than hard data showing students are performing better.
Conventional wisdom holds that many, if not most, education schools are doing a poor job at training teachers; after all, they have a history of taking in some of the lowest performing students, and student achievement in the United States has stagnated. Nationally, education schools have been criticized for being far too easy and, as a result, pumping ill-equipped teachers into the system and harming student achievement. Schools across the country are trying to mitigate the criticism by changing curriculum or increasing the amount of field experience teachers receive.
Florida and several other states are also creating accountability systems so education schools will develop quantitative ways to measure their programs’ success. But for now, teacher preparation remains over-saturated with options―undergraduate degrees, master’s programs, in-school residencies and online courses―that provide little evidence of their effectiveness. And as thousands of Florida’s baby boomer teachers prepare to retire, there is little consensus about how to best train the next generation of teachers.
Teacher's unions around the country are waiting and watching the Florida Education Association's challenge of the state teacher evaluation law.
The Florida Education Association’s lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state’s test-based teacher evaluations — if successful — could become a model for teacher’s union across the country, Governing magazine reports.
And over at the Quick and the Ed, labor attorney Danny Rosenthal argues the FEA normally would have a difficult time proving the government violated teachers’ 14th Amendment rights. But one of the teachers filing the Florida case was evaluated using students at a different school — a “striking fact” the union has on its side, Rosenthal writes.
The decision could have national implications by setting off a chain reaction of lawsuits testing other teacher evaluation provisions, he says.
Florida districts have yet to develop end-of-course exams for subjects such as art, music or physical education. So some districts used school-wide averages on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test for those teachers. That meant teachers were being rated for the performance of many students they had never taught.
The Republican Party of Florida has released two new Web videos to defend Gov. Rick Scott’s record on education.
The first is a compilation of news stories about Scott’s statewide tour celebrating his successful push to include teacher raises for the budget year beginning July 1.
Republicans turned against former Gov. Charlie Crist shortly after he greeted President Obama in 2009 and accepted federal stimulus money. Crist is now a Democrat and contemplating a run for governor.
Charlie Crist isn’t officially a Democratic candidate for governor — yet.
Crist made it clear both K-12 and higher education would be front and center if he runs. Teachers would not forget that Gov. Rick Scott came into office cutting education, Crist said, despite Scott’s support for teacher raises this year.
From his speech:
There’s just a couple of issues I want to share and talk with you about, and it starts with education. It starts with education because education is our most important civil right. It really is.
If we don’t fight for our public school teachers, if we don’t fight for our universities…then we’ve lost our way.
Now we have a governor that came into office and one of the first things he did was cut $1.4 billion dollars from education. And then he thinks that, you know this past session, you give a bonus to teachers — I’ve got news for him: Teachers are smart and cannot be bought.
A 2009 recording shows online educator K12 had difficulty hiring properly certified teachers in Florida. A draft state investigation found no evidence the company used teachers who were not Florida-certified, but used three teachers who were not subject certified.
State law requires teachers are certified in their subject area and by the state.
So when a K12 teacher saw her name listed on company documents as teaching Florida classes she had not taught, she asked her managers about it.
During a November 2009 conference call, the managers called it a mistake they were fixing. The recording was provided by a source and none of the participants were in states which require permission to record a phone call.
Allison Cleveland, K12’s vice president of school management and services, tried to assuage concerns that teacher certifications were used without that teacher’s knowledge.
“Well I think the important thing about Florida – you are not actually teaching in Florida,” she said on the tape. “You have not had any contact with students in Florida. I mean your name being on that list was nothing but a mistake. And, it took us a couple of days to get to the bottom of that…you know, and I feel like we’ve been able to resolve it.”
Company managers held a series of phone calls with staff to explain the situation, including admitting that a teacher’s name showed up on a roster of Florida teachers by mistake.
The phone call was recorded and provided to the Florida Department of Education Office of Inspector General as part of an investigation into whether K12 used properly certified teachers in Seminole County.
Listen to the entire conversation between Allison Cleveland, vice president of school management and services Julie Frein, senior director of the K12 Educator Group, and K12 teacher Laura Creach.
K12 is the nation's largest online education company and serves Florida students in 43 school districts.
The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and StateImpact Florida have obtained internal emails and a recording of a company meeting that provide new insight into allegations that K12 Inc., the nation’s largest online education company, uses teachers in Florida who do not have all of the required state certifications.
Department of Education investigators did not find teachers without state certification, as a complaint filed by the Seminole County School District had claimed. But the investigators did find teachers without necessary subject certifications. The draft report attributed the problem to sloppy paperwork at Virginia-based K12, rather than intent to skirt the law.
If that’s true, then paperwork for Florida classes has been a problem at K12 since 2009, according to the internal emails and the recording of a company meeting.
K12 operates in 43 Florida school districts, including in Miami-Dade, Broward, Hillsborough, Orange and Duval counties. The company teaches everything from art to algebra to students in kindergarten through high school.
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