Althea Valle teaches a class of ELL's. She says of the new federal requirement, "I think it’s going to put a lot of pressure on the schools to get these kids where we think they should be."
A 10th grader born in Haiti struggles to read in his class at Godby High School in Tallahassee. The student is more comfortable with Haitian Creole than English. Teacher Althea Valle has students of various nationalities trying to master the language.
“It’s a challenge,” Valle says. “There’s a lot of gesturing, and you know sometimes I feel like I’m onstage and sometimes I have to be onstage to make myself understood.”
Valle is the ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) coordinator for Leon County schools. Her developmental language class is offered as an elective for students who want the extra help, like Anas Al-Humiari from Yemen. His native language is Arabic, and he’s been studying English for 5 years.
“First of all, the words are the main things that get me down and the time, me trying to understand the sentence and what is the article or text actually means,” Al-Humiari says, trying to find the right words.
Florida A&M University is ranked number three and Florida International University is ranked seventh on the Social Mobility Index created by CollegeNET, a higher education technology firm, and Payscale, which tracks worker pay.
The rankings factor tuition, percentage of low income students, graduation rates, recent graduate earnings and school endowment. The rankings reward schools with low tuition or a high percentage of low-income students, in particular.
Florida State University ranked 29th, University of Florida 40th and the University of South Florida 48th.
Overall, the state of Florida ranked number four in the nation.
By comparison, Princeton ranked 360th, Harvard 438th and Yale 440th.
Hillsborough Community College students were more likely to visit tutors and complete remedial math courses with a $600 bonus on the line.
Hillsborough Community College students who were paid cash bonuses were more likely to complete remedial math courses and meet with math tutors, according to a new study from social science research firm MDRC.
The study looked at students in Hillsborough Community College’s Mathematics Access Performance Scholarship program, which pays students $600 per semester for three semesters, if they met goals. Those goals include visiting HCC’s Math Labs tutoring center at least five times and earning a ‘C’ grade or better on a college level math course or intermediate Algebra.
Veldreana Oliver has taught physical education for 28 years at Allapattah Middle School. More recently, her principal asked her to teach writing, speech and debate.
The school’s principal, Bridget McKinney majored in debate and thought the requirements for Florida’s new Common Core-based standards sounded a lot like her college classes. She needed a writing teacher for new speech and debate courses she wanted to create.
But like many Florida schools, Allapattah Middle has plenty of expectations but a limited budget.
She couldn’t hire a new teacher. It wasn’t in the budget. So she turned to what seems like an unusual place — physical education teacher Veldreana Oliver, who has been with the school for 28 years.
“Let’s go! Dale!” Oliver hollers at students looping around Allapattah’s campus. “Dale! Dale! Dale!”
She’s getting her students ready for a timed one-mile run.
But now she’s also getting them ready for the state’s new, annual exam.
Bridget McKinney, principal at Miami’s Allapattah Middle School, says her students struggle to pass the state’s reading and writing tests.
So when McKinney first read the Common Core math and language arts standards used in Florida schools this year, what jumped out was the emphasis on answering questions and making arguments using examples and evidence from what students are reading.
John O'Connor / StateImpact Florida
Allapattah Middle School principal Bridget McKinney sits in on one of the speech and debate classes she's required her students to take. McKinney says the Common Core standards emphasis using evidence and making arguments.
It took McKinney back to college — she was a speech major. So she decided her sixth, seventh and eighth graders would have to take a speech and debate course each year.
McKinney says the goal is to improve reading and writing skills — and state test scores.
“It’s been our Achilles’ heel at Allapattah, meeting that minimum requirement for literacy,” McKinney says. “I have to be very, very innovative or an out-of-the-box thinker to make this connection for my students.”
The ACLU is worried single-gender classes might reinforce stereotypes of the 1950s.
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed federal complaints against school districts in Broward, Hernando, Hillsborough and Volusia counties over the use of all-girls or all-boys classes. The ACLU wants the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to investigate the programs.
StateImpact Florida’s Gina Jordan spoke with Galen Sherwin, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, about the complaints.
Q: Galen, what do the complaints say?
A: Schools shouldn’t be in the business of making crude judgments of children’s educational needs based solely on whether they’re a boy or a girl – that’s the definition of sex discrimination.
They’re using different teaching methods, environments and even curricula.
The Florida PTA is asking the state to delay school grades during the transition to new standards and tests.
The Florida PTA is asking state leaders to consider delaying school grading to give students and schools time to adjust to new math and language arts standards and online tests.
This is the first year every grade is using Florida’s Common Core-based standards and students will take the new Florida Standards Assessment early in 2015.
The Florida PTA is asking:
Allow for proper field-testing and test development in areas with similar demographics to Florida’s diverse demographics — The American Institutes For Research, the state’s new test vendor, is building an exam using test questions developed for Utah. Florida educators are concerned those questions won’t be as valid for Florida, which has a higher percentage of black, Hispanic and low-income students than Utah.
State university officials are asking for $45 million in needs-based aid to help make up for cuts to Bright Futures.
State university leaders want to add $45 million in needs-based financial aid to help make up for changes to the Bright Futures scholarship program. Those new, higher qualifications will eliminate more than $250 million a year in college aid by 2018.
The State University System Board of Governors will discuss the proposal today. UPDATE: The Board of Governors has delayed a vote on adding $45 million. They want more time to discuss the issue.
“Without these funds, retention and graduation rates are likely to fall as students come to grips with the financial implications of continuing their schooling,” system officials wrote in an analysis of the proposal. Students graduating with less debt and ready to enter the workforce can return three times the money in tax revenue and economic growth than the cost of the aid, they wrote.
The report also notes a strong correlation between income and college entrance exam test scores, such as the ACT and SAT. Bright Futures eligibility is now heavily dependent on SAT and ACT scores. The U.S. Department of Education has reopened an investigation to determine whether Bright Futures’ use of test results is discriminatory.
University of Central Florida elementary education students discuss how to incorporate books, maps, magazines and other materials into lesson plans in this 2013 photo.
A strong majority of Americans surveyed want teachers to have at least one year’s practice time in the classroom and pass a board certification before teaching, according to a new national poll.
The Phi Delta Kappa professional teacher’s organization and Gallup released a second batch of their annual survey data Tuesday. The poll surveyed 1,001 adults by phone and has a margin of error of 4.6 percent.
“It appears we’ve reached a real turning point in public attitudes,” said William Bushaw, chief executive officer of PDK International. “While we can speculate about all the factors that brought us here, there’s no longer any question about whether the public supports a major overhaul in the preparation and evaluation of teachers.”
Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said they trust teachers. And seven in ten said they oppose the use of standardized tests to evaluate teachers.
But 43 percent surveyed said teachers should have a year of practice time under a certified teacher before taking over a classroom. Another 30 percent said teachers needed two years of practice time.
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