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.
Jean Clements, president of the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association
Hillsborough County Classroom Teachers Association president Jean Clements says dual efforts to toughen Florida’s school grading system and approve a law allowing a majority of parents to choose how to restructure their child’s failing school amount to an education land grab for private business.
Clements argues Florida Department of Education is changing its grade standards with the intention of failing more schools. The agency argues raising standards will compel schools to find ways to improve.
Parents at those failing schools could then invoke the newly approved legislation, nicknamed the “parent trigger,” and force the district to restructure the school. That could include closing the school, replacing the principal and/or staff or converting to a charter school.
Austin and Arielle Metzger discuss living in a truck with '60 Minutes'' Scott Pelley.
The Associated Press has a terrific profile out on a homeless student in Lake County, the latest in a series of stories using Florida as the face of the Great Recession.
The Associated Press features Zach Montgomery, a 17-year-old living in Clermont whose parents both lost their jobs driving buses at Disney. It’s full of heart-breaking details:
Parents and students protest outside then-Gov. Jeb Bush's Miami office in this 2003 photo.
A South Florida school is feeding students “FCAT power bars” and hoping the apple-flavored cereal bar gives students more confidence facing the annual Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, according to the Sun-Sentinel.
The district says they don’t want kids at Palm Beach County’s Hagen Road Elementary School to take the test on an empty stomach.
But check out this quote from Robert De Gennaro a teacher and union representative, who argues basing teacher performance on the FCAT only encourages the power bar and other ideas. School districts must base 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation on FCAT scores.
“If you were given a choice between your salary and hoodwinking kids, which would you choose?” De Gennaro asked.
The NBA All-Star game was in Orlando over the weekend, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined in the celebrity game.
Duncan captained the Harvard squad and was an academic All-American during his time in Cambridge. Duncan also played professionally, much of it in Australia.
Here’s a couple of clips from the game, including the best blown assist you’re likely to see.
Also note that ESPN’s Stuart Scott refers to Duncan as the “Secretary of Defense.” We’re not sure if Scott is referring to the fact that Duncan had five steals or not.
Here’s seven questions about what’s being proposed, how it could affect schools and why it matters.
1. Why is the school grading system changing?
For two reasons: Some of the changes have been long-planned as a way to toughen standards that have seen more schools earn As and Bs since they were first put into place. Advocates, such as Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson, argue the grading system has forced schools to improve. Raising the standards will force schools to improve again.
Former USF Polytechnic Chancellor Marshall Goodman, USF President Judy Genshaft, USFP SGA President Zach Crum and Sen. J.D. Alexander, in happier days.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has condensed the months-long saga over the University of South Florida Polytechnic’s future into one handy story.
Most interesting to Florida readers is an interview with the president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the organization that would accredit the new, independent school.
President Belle Wheelan said the new school’s accreditation could take longer — and additional three years — if it is independent from the University of South Florida.
Also interesting? Wheelan said she did not tell Polk County Sen. JD Alexander that the school could earn even temporary accreditation by July, when the budget makes the new school official. Alexander has been quoted saying he had been assured the school could a temporary accreditation quickly. From the story:
Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson says the state may not include schools that specialize in students with disabilities in the new school grading formula now under discussion.
“One simulation, for example,” Robinson said in a statement released Thursday afternoon, “includes grading all schools that serve students with disabilities; however, we are reviewing alternative options for schools that serve only these students.”
Robinson said the agency was considering the feedback they’ve received so far. Some parents and education officials have questioned the new grading system, which school officials believe will lead to many more failing Florida schools.
A Florida Department of Education simulation showed 231 additional schools would be considered failing.
Advanced calculus teacher, Orlando Sarduy writes out the mathematical equation that will help grade teachers and determine how much they get paid. The formula considers 10 factors that influence how well a student does in school, but student poverty is not one of those factors.
Asking whether poverty is included in the Florida formula to evaluate teachers is posing the wrong question, according to Matthew DiCarlo at The Shanker Blog.
DiCarlo is referring to a recent story where some educators questioned the lack of a poverty factor in the state teacher evaluation formula. State officials argue poverty is irrelevant because the formula measures student improvement over a period of years.
DiCarlo notes the formula can accurately account for poverty indirectly, by using factors that serve as proxies for poverty. But what’s more important is making sure the formula accounts for all factors outside a teacher’s control.
Education philanthropist Bill Gates believes teacher evaluations should be private.
The leading advocate for modern, complex teacher evaluation formulas argues they should not be used for their most basic purpose — comparing one teacher’s score to another.
In an op-ed in the New York Times, Microsoft founder Bill Gates argues individual teacher scores should not be a tool to publicly shame low-rated teachers. To do so is a reductive, simplistic use of the information and doesn’t foster a culture that encourages teachers to learn and improve.
Value-added ratings are one important piece of a complete personnel system. But student test scores alone aren’t a sensitive enough measure to gauge effective teaching, nor are they diagnostic enough to identify areas of improvement. Teaching is multifaceted, complex work. A reliable evaluation system must incorporate other measures of effectiveness, like students’ feedback about their teachers and classroom observations by highly trained peer evaluators and principals.
Putting sophisticated personnel systems in place is going to take a serious commitment. Those who believe we can do it on the cheap — by doing things like making individual teachers’ performance reports public — are underestimating the level of resources needed to spur real improvement.
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