Sammy Mack is the Miami-based education reporter for StateImpact Florida. Sammy previously was a digital editor and health care policy reporter for WLRN - Miami Herald News. She is a St. Petersburg native and a product of Florida public schools. She even took the first FCAT.
Florida gets a new GED exam today. The high school equivalency test is going exclusively online.
Education advocates are greeting it with mixed feelings.
The new GED has been retooled to emphasize workplace and college skills. That’s part of why advocates say it makes sense to offer it only as a computer-based exam. Test-takers will also get their unofficial results instantly.
But some educators are concerned that degree-seekers who are not computer proficient will be left behind. And the new GED has a new price: $128 for the full exam. The old paper and pencil test was $70.
StateImpact Florida has been looking into the new exam. Here’s a collection of stories to get you up to speed:
Michael Buckley is a best-selling children's author.
Children’s author Michael Buckley has spent a lot of time thinking about bullies. He’s the bestselling author of the NERDS series, which features a bunch of nerdy kids who deal with bullies during the school day and moonlight as top-secret superheroes the rest of the time.
“How hard it must be to be a teacher in the United States. Every four years some new knucklehead gets elected and then tells everybody that they’re doing their job completely wrong and we’re going to have to fix the whole educational system,” says Buckley. “So every four years I think writers for children have to evolve a little bit, too.”
Buckley spoke with StateImpact Florida about bullying, writing for school-aged children, how his son’s education is different from his own, and why Common Core emphasis on nonfiction in particular is changing expectations of children’s writers.
Your books deal a lot with school bullying. What has the response been from students reading this?
When I go to schools and I ask the kids, ‘who here thinks of themselves as a nerd?’—what I discover is that almost every kid is raising their hands.
Now that’s not something I would have admitted at all when I was a kid—I would never have confessed that I was a nerd even though I was a terrible nerd.
But today, to be a little different and a little awkward is almost like a badge of honor with these kids. And they really love the thing about them that makes them different. Continue Reading →
Sheila Keenan, author of a new graphic novel for kids, called Dogs of War, says she tries not to think too much about classroom policies when she writes.
scholastic.com
Sheila Keenan is author of the new graphic novel, Dogs of War.
“Good storytelling is good storytelling,” says Keenan.
Her latest work is about the relationships between soldiers and dogs during World War I. World War II and the Vietnam War. It’s fiction, but she did a lot of research to make sure it was historically accurate.
Keenan sat down with StateImpact Florida earlier this year to talk about graphic novels, libraries, and how the Common Core State Standards influence her writing.
Q: How does the way that literature gets taught in schools influence how you think about the way you’re writing for children?
A: To be honest, I don’t think of that first. I’m really thinking about storytelling first because I believe that kids aren’t any different from adults as readers. We want to read good stories.
I think one of the added benefits of graphic novels—at least what I hear from librarians—is that they’re flying off the shelves. Kids really like them. I think it’s the appeal of the visuals first—even though that’s of course so hard to say as a writer. But nonetheless, kids live in a far more visually integrated world now than ever. I think graphic novels appeal to them because of that.
But for kids who are struggling as readers, or don’t see themselves as good readers, a graphic novel is an awesome entry point. They can just jump right into the story. Reading a graphic novel, because its sequential, it is modeling the reading process for someone who is not as adept at literacy as someone else. It’s a great thing for them. Continue Reading →
Brothers Rodney Jones and Tremain McCreary attend the school that will no longer be named Nathan B. Forrest High School
When Rodney Jones and Tremain McCreary walked to school on Tuesday morning, the brothers were headed to the same classrooms, to sit next to the same students, in a building with the same façade it had on Monday.
But it was not the same school they had gone to the day before.
“It’s a relief to me to know the school name had changed—I was thinking about it: how do we have a KKK leader’s name for our school?” says Jones.
“Things are changing around this school,” says McCreary.
On Monday night, the Duval County Public School Board voted unanimously to rename Nathan B. Forrest High School.
Forrest High was originally named for Nathan Bedford Forrest—the Civil War general and first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
After more than a half century of controversy, Nathan B. Forrest High School in Jacksonville is looking for a new name.
In 1959, Forrest High was named for Nathan Bedford Forrest—the Civil War general and early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
But Monday night, on the recommendation of Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, the Duval County School Board voted unanimously to rename the high school.
“There are deep divides on some levels between communities—that goes back to slavery, it goes back to Jim Crow,” Vitti told StateImpact Florida in June. “At some point we have to go beyond talking about it to doing things differently.”
LISTEN: Nikolai Vitti’s First Conversation With StateImpact Florida/audio]
He says the new name will be chosen by students and other community stakeholders.
StateImpact Florida reporter Sammy Mack sat down again with Duval Superintendent Nikolai Vitti to talk about what’s in a name: Continue Reading →
Allison Rojas is a student at Design and Architecture Senior High in Miami.
When Allison Rojas looks at a painting by Alice Neel, the high school junior sees more than a seated woman in a purple sari.
“She uses very bold lines as you can see,” says Rojas. “Very fleshy paintings.”
Rojas has an eye that’s been trained in fine arts classes at Miami’s Design and Architecture Senior High. DASH is an arts magnet—consistently ranked among the country’s top public schools—and every year, Rojas and her classmates have taken a fieldtrip with the school to Art Basel, where she gets to see works like Neel’s Woman.
It’s a unique opportunity for these students—especially as so many of their peers don’t get this kind of exposure.
School districts must come up with their own distribution plans for teacher raises.
Back in May, Gov. Rick Scott took a victory lap after the Florida Legislature approved $480 million for teacher pay raises.
“It’s a great day for teachers. It’s also a great day for students,” he said at the time.
Seven months later, Scott’s wheedling school districts to actually spend that money.
The raises—intended to start at $2,500 per teacher—have to be negotiated through unions and the districts must come up with their own distribution plans. It’s been a protracted process in many counties and Scott, who is up for reelection in 2014, would like to see it sped up.
Immokalee Community School offers classes to help parents encourage bilingual children.
To get into Florida colleges and universities, you have to have studied—or be able to speak—a second language. But Florida students don’t have to take foreign language classes to graduate from high school.
So in a part of the state where most families already speak a second language, Immokalee Community School is leaning on parents to make sure their children stay bilingual. As a condition of their children attending the school, every parent has signed a contract to speak Spanish with their kids for at least 30 minutes a day, most days of the week.
It’s an unusual effort to keep the students of Immokalee Community School from losing their Spanish—something that often happens between generations of immigrants.
Miami Book Fair International brought more than four dozen children’s authors to Florida over the weekend
More than four dozen contemporary young adult and children’s authors were in Florida over the weekend for Miami Book Fair International.
As Common Core State Standards for English and language arts are putting a national spotlight on what kids read in class, many of those authors are thinking about the way literature is taught in school—and how that’s changing.
StateImpact Florida spoke with several authors about how the new standards and other education policies shape the way they write.
When Sherman Alexie comes to a book fair, he enjoys the communal storytelling.
“I like the notion of all that energy surrounding books,” says Alexie.
Alexie is the author of award-winning novels, poetry and short story collections about Indian characters living on and off modern-day reservations. His protagonists frequently share a deep, obsessive love of books and basketball.
Alexie returns to the Miami Book Fair Tuesday night at 8:00 for a much-anticipated author talk—his last appearance at the fair in 2009 was a wildly engaging performance of his stories with a heavy dose of stand-up.
Alexie joined us from a studio in Seattle for a conversation on why, in an age of e-readers, books—and book fairs—matter. You can listen to that interview here:
Alexie also talked about his young adult audience—and what it means to author a banned book.
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