Florida Parents Against Common Core protested a national meeting discussing the standards in Orlando last month.
When Gov. Rick Scott and Education Commissioner Tony Bennett met with school superintendents in April, Florida’s new education standards led the questions.
“Let’s start with Common Core,” said Martin County superintendent Laurie Gaylord. “We recently held a Common Core workshop for our school board and our community and we got picketed…So I guess I’m reaching out so that we can have the same message for all of us throughout the state — if there’s a marketing-type plan to be able to help us.”
Common Core is supposed to prepare students better for college or a career. Teachers will cover fewer topics, but spend more time on each one. And students will spend less time memorizing facts and more time learning to analyze and explain things.
Florida is one of 45 states that has adopted new math, English and literacy standards known as Common Core.
A poll last year by the nonprofit group Achieve found just one in five people had heard at least “some” things about Common Core.
Common Core supporters are trying to educate parents about what’s new in the standards and why they will improve schools.
Opponents are trying to halt the new standards before they are used in every state classroom when the school year begins in 2014. They say the standards are no improvement and worry the multi-state project will mean the loss of local control. Others worry Common Core will increase testing and cost more.
Both sides are in a public relations race to reach those who don’t know about the standards first.
Education Commissioner Tony Bennett says he could recommend a new test in July or August.
In the next few weeks, the man in charge of kindergarten through twelfth grade education in Florida has to answer a multiple choice question: Which standardized test should the state pick to replace the FCAT?
“We have to get the assessment right,” Bennett recently said. “Whether that’s PARCC, or whether that is a different assessment system that other states are, frankly, looking at as well. If you were to ask me item number one next 30 to 60 days? That’s item number one; we have to make that decision.”
It’s summertime and Angela Maxey, principal of Sallye B. Mathis Elementary School, is observing a classroom of 9- and 10-year-olds draw and identify different kinds of triangles.
Karelia Arauz
Campers in the summer program at Sallye B. Mathis Elementary School learn Common Core lessons.
“Remember this is fourth grade—they’ve just finished third grade, but they’re learning fourth grade curriculum,” says Maxey. “It’s all Common Core.”
This is not your traditional summer school. The kids in this classroom are part of Duval County Public Schools’ Superintendent’s Summer Academy. They’ll be voluntarily spending their summer here, at Sallye B., learning math and science lessons in the classroom and on field trips—with the explicit goal of preventing summer learning losses.
In the three months that they’re out of school, most kids lose some of what they learned in the school year. On average, students start school in the fall about a month behind where they left off in the spring. Research shows that kids from low-income, minority schools lose disproportionately more over the summer. Those losses build up and, down the road, can keep a kid from graduating. Continue Reading →
Nikolai Vitti has been superintendent of Duval County Public Schools since November 2012.
Vitti arrived in North Florida last November, leaving behind a job as chief academic officer for Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
On the surface, Miami-Dade and Duval represent two very different kinds of Florida school districts. There are nearly 350,000 public school students in Miami-Dade—close to two thirds of them are Hispanic, nearly a quarter are black. The Duval school system has about 125,000 students, 44% of whom are black and 39% of whom are white.
Vitti sat down with StateImpact Florida to talk about the transition from South Florida to North Florida—and what he learned during his first school year on the job.
Sarasota County middle school students work on math problems in a “classroom of tomorrow.”
Actress Mayim Bialik works on algebra problems with Sarasota County students.
Sarasota County middle school math teacher Brenda Fuoco, in 2013.
Actress Mayim Bialik works on math problems with Sarasota County middle school students (from left) Amanda Folsom, Daphne Waggener and Gracie Brasacchio.
Chris Pfahler, who manages the STEMsmart program for the Gulf Coast Community Foundation.
It’s finals week at Park Vista Community High School and a small group of students buzzes over an assembly line of used Dell computers that lie cracked open with all their electronic guts exposed.
Sammy Mack / StateImpact
Students at Park Vista Community High School refurbish computers for donation.
“Right now it’s kind of messy,” says Park Vista junior Jonathan Stabio. “But essentially what we do is take a computer out of the pile that has all the components, we open it up, make sure it has everything necessary to make it run… and get them ready to be shipped off.”
Many of the donated computers that Stabio refurbishes in class will be given to families who don’t have computers at home. It’s part of a Palm Beach County program aimed at closing the digital divide.
The state already requires high schoolers to take at least one online course. By fall 2015 half of all classroom instruction will need to be digital, and students will take the standardized test that replaces the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test on a computer.
Kids like Stabio—kids fluent in technology, with access to the Internet at home and school—are well positioned to make the transition to a more digital learning environment.
But many students don’t have that advantage. By one estimate from a survey of school administrators and technology specialists, a third of Florida students don’t have a computer at home. And even if they did, it wouldn’t guarantee they would land on the right side of the digital divide. Continue Reading →
One of the responses came from Neyda Borges, a teacher at Miami Lakes Educational Center. She wrote this essay about what she learned in school this year:
It’s family literacy night at Holmes Elementary School in Liberty City, and first grader Adam Redding is reading a poem about plants while he absentmindedly tips dirt out of a plastic cup and onto a laptop.
Sammy Mack / StateImpact
In this classroom, dirt on a keyboard is okay. The green and white computer is a rugged little machine from One Laptop Per Child, the organization best known for trying to put an inexpensive computer into the hands of every child in the developing world. Adam’s cup of dirt is part of a lesson plan that involves researching plants on the laptop, reading a poem, and seeding a corn kernel in a cup.
Welcome to the one-to-one classroom. One computer for every student. Continue Reading →
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.
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.”
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