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.
Schools must earn at least 25 points out of 50 on the scoring scale to be eligible for a slice of the new funding. But the three lowest-scoring universities do not receive new money, even if they receive a score of more than 25 points.
Senator Jeff Brandes’ bill would allow the State Board of Education to give out-of-state charter school chains the high-performing designation. The bill would also allow out-of-state school operators to pay lower administrative fees to school districts for three years.
Superintendent Alberto Carvalho says vaccinations work and the district is tracking whether students get their required shots. Carvalho says 98 percent of Miami-Dade students have been vaccinated or are getting the shots now.
“We’ve seen recently what the outbreak of measles in Arizona can do to a community,” Carvalho says. “That can not be the case in Miami. So we are diligent in ensuring our children are properly immunized prior to beginning their school year.”
That includes 1,200 students new to the district this year, many escaping dangerous communities in Central America.
Miami Beach Senior High college adviser Maria Sahwell helps Anahi Hurtado, left, and her mother fill out the FAFSA.
It’s a midweek school night at Miami Beach Senior High School.
Students, their parents and siblings — roughly 80 people in all — are waiting in the school’s library to get on a computer and answer a lot of questions.
By this time of year many high school seniors have already sent in their first college applications. Now, the question is how to pay for it. And for most that means the FAFSA.
But half of Florida high school graduates don’t complete the form, losing out on at least $100 million dollars for college each year.
Anahi Hurtado wants to study political journalism. She and her mother, Susy Riener, quickly run into their first obstacle.
Education Commissioner Pam Stewart says state law doesn't allow parents to opt their children out of required testing.
Education Commissioner Pam Stewart says students can not skip state-required tests, and teachers and schools can be punished for refusing to administer required exams.
Stewart says state law allows students to skip required tests for one reason: They have been granted an exemption for medical reasons or disabilities. It’s up to districts to decide when and if students can skip locally-required exams, Stewart wrote.
“State law requires students to participate in the state assessment system,” Stewart wrote, “therefore, there is no opt out clause or process for students to opt out or for parents to opt their children out.”
Any changes to opt out rules would required the legislature to pass a law.
UF education professors Joseph Gagnon and Brianna Kennedy-Lewis culled discipline data, interviewed school leaders who use corporal punishment and surveyed administrators at high-poverty schools about what they do to discipline students.
Anya Kamenetz is an education reporter for NPR and author of a new book on testing in U.S. schools.
Lots of people think there’s too much testing going on in schools right now. It’s one of the most contentious issues in education.
Lawmakers want to scale back the amount of time Florida students spend taking tests.
But at the same time, Florida is rolling out a new test tied to new math and language arts standards — known as Common Core.
NPR education reporter Anya Kamenetz researched the history and use of standardized exams for her book, “The Test.”
Kamenetz sat down with WLRN’s StateImpact Florida education reporter John O’Connor to talk about what students are losing — because of all the tests.
Q: What was your view on testing before you started work on the book and did it change at all during the course of reporting and writing it?
A: As I began to be an education reporter, first I was a higher education reporter. And I was very enthralled with, sort of, innovations in higher ed. And when I turned my attention to K-12, partly because I had a child of my own, I realized that there was very much less scope for, sort of, innovation in K-12.
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Editor’s note: As schools around the country celebrate the Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday holiday, we’re reposting this essay from former South Florida teacher Jeremy Glazer about race in education.
Here’s a question:How do you teach a class of all black students in an all black school that Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation decades ago?
That isn’t a hypothetical question, but one I remember clearly asking myself. I was teaching American History for the first time in one of our nation’s many embarrassingly homogeneous schools. I could not, with a straight face, teach my students that segregation had ended. They’d think that either they or I didn’t know what the word segregation meant.
But, as a beginning teacher, I was afraid of telling too much truth. Brown’s legacy is not a hopeful story about law, or government, or progress, and it seemed like a particularly cruel lesson in power, racism, and injustice. I wanted to be both honest and gentle to my students and probably failed at both.
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