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.
President Barack Obama speaks in the East Room of the White House in September, rolling out a plan to waive key provisions of No Child Left Behind for states that apply.
When President Obama announced a plan in September to allow states to apply for waivers from key requirements of the No Child Left Behind law, he took a shot at Congress.
“I’ve urged Congress for a while now — let’s get a bipartisan effort, let’s fix it [NCLB]. Congress hasn’t been able to do it, so I will,” the President said.
It’s a line President Obama could easily use in a re-election campaign should he choose to run based on what lawmakers didn’t do during his tenure.
Florida International University professor Laura Dinehart says research shows students with better handwriting earn better grades.
Want your child to do better in math or be a stronger reader? Have them write out your weekly shopping list.
That’s according to research by Florida International University professor Laura Dinehart.
Dinehart studied more than 3,000 four-year-olds in Miami-Dade County. Those who received better grades on fine motor skill tasks, such as writing, also scored higher on math and reading tests taken later.
Dinehart says schools should put more emphasis on handwriting, cursive and art.
“Schools have kind of dropped handwriting from their curriculum and I think it might have been jumping the gun a little bit,” she says. “I think it forces us to take a second look at what handwriting might actually be providing kids.”
The Republican presidential candidates at a debate in Charleston, S.C. last week.
As the Republican candidates for president arrive in Florida, they agree on one thing: The federal government should have a smaller role in education.
But what that role should be varies among the candidates. Texas U.S. Rep. Ron Paul would eliminate the federal Department of Education and leave all decisions to state and local governments. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum all support — or have supported — a federal role, but have opposed some federal programs such as Race to the Top.
Florida has used federal programs, especially Race to the Top, to create the data-based initiatives measuring student, teacher and school performance first advocated by former Gov. Jeb Bush. That includes the new statewide teacher evaluation system districts must put in place by the 2014 school year.
Questioning teacher pay may be the third rail of education policy.
Few things get teachers talking quite like their paycheck, so we knew a recent post about a teacher salary study would get some reaction.
And did it ever.
Most people criticized the study, conducted by two conservative-leaning think tanks, with some picking apart the methodology. A few said the criticism of teacher pay is the opposite of class warfare critiques of the wealthy.
A few people argued teachers do have it as good as the report concluded.
Michael Long is the student representative on the Board of Governors, chosen by the Florida Student Association.
A Florida student activist group says Gov. Rick Scott has appointed too many businessmen and developers and not enough people connected to the state’s universities and students.
The Florida Alliance for Student Action is planning a March 1st statewide protest. The group is also concerned about a bill that would strip a student-chosen representative from the Board of Governors and allow Scott to appoint the representative.
The House has met Gov. Rick Scott's challenge to add $1 billion for K-12.
The Florida House is proposing a budget that would match Gov. Rick Scott’s goal of adding $1 billion for K-12 education, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
Speaker Dean Cannon, R-Winter Park, said adding the money won’t be easy, but the state’s economy is improving. From Cannon’s press release:
We have endeavored to prioritize the most essential functions of state government. I want to specifically draw your attention to public school funding. Enrollment in our public schools has increased while local school revenues have sharply decreased. These two factors alone create a shortfall of nearly half a billion dollars.
Our analysis and prioritization with respect to K-12 education funding mirror those of Governor Scott. We have funded K-12 with an allocation exceeding $1 billion in new state funding to the Florida Education Finance Program. This addresses all of the shortfalls in K-12 education and also provides an increase in per student funding of 2.27 percent.
The Senate is now on the clock for their proposal. The body has floated the idea of recessing for several weeks to see if the state’s budget situation changes.
The nation’s fourth-largest school district fired just 10 of more than 20,000 teachers last year for poor performance, according to the report. In comparison, Springfield, Illinois fired 10 of 2,144 teachers while the Los Angeles Unified School District fired 280 of roughly 29,000 teachers.
“When you’re dealing with 20,000 adults, you would expect a lot more teachers to be dismissed for not being very good teachers,” said Kate Walsh, president of NCTQ. “You’d expect a much higher rate of dismissal.”
Walsh said she’s not advocating for large-scale firings, but culling poor-performing teachers is important for the professional well-being of other teachers.
House Speaker Dean Cannon said the House shares Gov. Rick Scott's goal of boosting education budgets.
House Speaker Dean Cannon says he shares Gov. Rick Scott’s goal of adding $1 billion for Florida schools, but stopped short of committing to the money in next year’s budget.
“It’s too soon to tell,” Cannon said. “That’s one of those areas where we share the governor’s goal in the House…as far as increasing K-12 education funding. The method which we get there probably won’t be identical to the governor’s approach. We hopefully will take some of his ideas, hopefully add our ideas to it, maybe approach it in a different way.”
Intrigued, we asked the Department of Education about Scott’s request.
Is this something the agency is just studying? When will the first rankings be released? What’s the methodology? Will the rankings factor into school bonuses or teacher merit pay?
Unfortunately, the agency declined to answer any of those questions. Spokesman Cheryl Etters sent along this statement:
“We have been working on various ways to approach the Governor’s request,” Etters wrote. “Nothing is final yet, but we should have something more concrete in a few weeks.”
Cleveland Teachers Union President David Quolke addresses a Cleveland SB-5 repeal watch party.
Based on November’s voter turnout in Ohio, it’s no surprise readers were ready to respond to our story this week that Florida leaders likely won’t initiate a collective bargaining fight in Florida this year (despite past statements to the contrary).
On Facebook, Angela Howard said there’s little advantage to collective bargaining anyway:
I don’t understand why they want to do anything about collective bargaining. Teachers don’t go on strike in FL. It’s not like our local teacher’s union her ever been able to do anything when the county doesn’t live up to what’s in the contract anyway. Districts can decide to give or not give raises and there’s nothing we can do about it. The only benefit I’ve ever gotten is the protection of my 25 minute lunch and my 50 minute planning period.
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