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.”
Florida International Academy charter school students in Opa Locka, Florida.
The Sunshine State ranks 3rd in the country for having some of the best charter school laws, according to a study by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS).
Each of the 42 states with charter school laws are scored on how well their laws support charter school growth, accountability and quality.
Actual school performance isn’t a factor in the NAPCS study. The study only looks at the charter school laws on the books. And they compare Florida laws to a model charter school application and contract that NAPCS created in 2009.
“It’s challenging for school boards to do a great job of authorizing essentially what some view as their competition.”
-Todd Ziebarth, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
Florida came in 2nd place last year, even though the state’s charter schools were disproportionately more likely to be graded an “F” school than traditional public schools.
Of the 31 “F” grades handed out by the state, 15 were handed to charter schools.
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.
Governor Rick Scott keeps saying he will veto any budget bill that does not significantly increase funding for Florida public schools. And he’s proposing an extra billion dollars.
But it turns out not all of that money would actually be new money for schools, according to the Governor’s top education policy chief, Scott Kittel.
Here’s the breakdown of the proposed $1.02 billion:
A new Fortune magazine profile says that Gov. Rick Scott wants to rank every Florida school.
Fortune magazine is out with a new profile of Gov. Rick Scott this week that discusses what he’s learned in his first year in office.
The profile hits all the standards marks — Photo of state seal-emblazoned cowboy boots? Check. — but also includes this intriguing detail:
I’m sitting in the governor’s Tallahassee office as Scott quizzes his education chief on a plan to rank the state’s 3,800 schools, first to last. The concept of imposing new metrics is pure Scott and dates, he is explaining, to his Columbia/HCA days, when he would rank, say, emergency rooms, to distill what separated the best from the worst. “Really, if you think about some of this stuff, it’s pretty simplistic,” he says. It’s also exactly the kind of thing that rankles state employees and constituents (“shareholders,” in Scott parlance).
Education Secretary Arne Duncan is one high-profile critic of a teacher salary study from conservative researchers.
Remember that study from two conservative think tanks that argued teachers were overpaid by 50 percent?
The study concluded that taxpayers were “overcharged” by $120 billion each year. That’s the difference between what teachers are paid in salary and benefits and what they would earn in a comparable private sector job.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan rebuked the study, writing in U.S. News and World Report that it “asks the wrong question,” “ignores facts that conflict with its conclusions” and “insults teachers and demeans the profession.”
The study’s authors, Jason Richwine and Andrew C. Biggs, fired back this week in an op-ed published by Education Week:
Is New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott sending a message to charter schools?
New York City’s decision to close a C-rated charter school has sparked a national conversation about what kind of performance should be expected of charter schools.
The school had been previously warned about its performance.
Some observers say the closure of Peninsula Preparatory Charter School is a signal charters need to do more. Is it enough for charter schools to be average, or should they be better than district schools?
Florida’s falling rank on a nation education survey is evidence lawmakers need to increase school funding, state education officials said Thursday morning.
Florida fell to 11th from 5th on the annual “Quality Counts” rankings released by Education Week this morning. Florida was ranked lower in both academic achievement and financing in the survey.
Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, has asked the GOP-controlled Legislature to add $1 billion to the school budget this year.
“We know that our educational system has been strained by the economic downturn,” education commissioner Gerard Robinson said in a statement. “The additional investment in a high-quality education will not show up immediately, but it will be a factor in our success as we move forward.”
StateImpact seeks to inform and engage local communities with broadcast and online news focused on how state government decisions affect your lives. Learn More »
