The state is stepping up its standards on the written portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test to prepare for coming tougher national standards and to weed out essays that seem coached for better scores, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
Finally, the department doesn’t want to see evidence that students have memorized phrases to use on their FCAT essays.
“Rote memorization or overuse of compositional techniques, such as rhetorical questions, implausible statistics, or pretentious language is not the expectation for quality writing at any grade level,” the memo stated.
The use of memorized phrases, or what the department calls “template writing,” is one the state has been trying to stamp out for several years.
The practice, state officials have said, involves students at the same school using the same phrases in their essays, suggesting they’ve been “coached” to employ them. The phrases include over-the-top language such as “a potpourri of iridescent colors surrounded me,” and similar, contrived story conventions such as writing, “POOF!” and then describing the character suddenly being in a land of dragons, pirates or fairies.
“Teaching to the test” is a common complaint about standardized tests such as the FCAT, where teachers spend classroom time prepping students for a test that, in part, determines an educator’s performance. What does it say that the state has to revamp its grading to counteract “coaching” by schools?
The state plans to release examples of the new essay scoring system later this month.
New Mexico Democrats are skeptical of Hanna Skandera, candidate for the state’s top education post, and her ties to the Foundation For Excellence in Education founded by former Florida Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, according to the Albuquerque Journal.
Several legislators were concerned Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education has too much influence.
“It sounds like, to me anyway, that the Foundation for Excellence in Education sort of is driving the ship here, in terms of the kinds of reforms that are going to be taking place in New Mexico,” said Rep. Eleanor Chavez, D-Albuquerque.
Skandera worked on Jeb Bush’s education team, and aspects of her reform agenda are from the “Florida model.”
Anytime a possible presidential candidate mixes with an early primary state, such as Iowa, national news is guaranteed. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, knows this and said at a stop in Des Moines he wanted to use his bully pulpit to push for education reform — his last agenda item this year.
Much of what Christie is proposing has already been adopted in Florida — performance pay for teachers, eliminating tenure, tax breaks for companies that fund scholarships — but Christie, like Republican former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, is a growing national voice in education reform after his well-publicized May confrontation with a teacher complaining about pay.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer:
“Maybe we can stop the arguing and bickering for a while,” he said. “Maybe we can put aside the personal self-interests of unions and politicians and start to figure out what unites us, and start to take some risk…
“Every major news service in America will cover the fact that I’m here to talk about education reform, and it’s the last of the big things I want to accomplish this year,” Christie said in an interview before the speech. “In the end, what I’m going to get from coming out here is attention for our ideas and plans for New Jersey on a national stage and I think that’s really advantageous for the state.”
That’s the question the Wall Street Journal asks in their weekend interview with the Microsoft founder and education philanthropist. Gates admits a $100 million program to create smaller high schools did not work as well as hoped:
“But the overall impact of the intervention, particularly the measure we care most about—whether you go to college—it didn’t move the needle much,” he says. “Maybe 10% more kids, but it wasn’t dramatic. . . . We didn’t see a path to having a big impact, so we did a mea culpa on that.” Still, he adds, “we think small schools were a better deal for the kids who went to them.”
The Gates interview raises questions about failed education experiments. Gates’ said his smaller high school initiative did not work, so, similar to dropping a computer operating system that fails to meet expectations, he tried something new despite students seeing slight performance gains. But what if the next experiment has an adverse effect on students? Or what if Hillsborough County’s Gates-funded initiative to evaluate teachers serves only to frustrate and drive educators from the profession?
Gates clearly believes more education research and development money is needed, but where should communities draw the line between the need to innovate and a failed experiment’s detrimental effect on students?
Federal officials are concerned too many disruptive students are winding up in the juvenile justice system — and therefore not completing their education, according to Education Week‘s Politics K-12 blog. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan describes what he saw leading Chicago schools:
“A small group of principals were calling the police too often to deal with minor disciplinary issues, he said, while schools with similar demographics handled the same behavior problems in other ways. ‘People wanted to do the right thing. They just didn’t know better,’ he said. ‘So many of these children need assistance. What they don’t need is to be pushed out the door.'”
Florida has had a zero tolerance policy since 2001 that requires student expulsion for bringing a weapon to school or making a threat towards school events, property or officials. The federal initiative could provide guidance for districts drafting additional discipline policies.
Where should the line be drawn? How should schools balance student safety against trying to graduate as many students as possible?
Pinellas County teachers are worried about next year’s vote to renew a $30 million tax increase for salaries, arts, music and technology.
“I’m very concerned,” union president Kim Black told the St. Petersburg Times editorial board.
Black noted the anti-tax mood, then added: “When all of this turmoil is happening — whether it’s the budget, negotiations (between the district and the union), the issues with the superintendent — all of those things create a lack of confidence, I believe, in the public school system.”
I first realized the power I have as a journalist while covering education in Oakland.
I was part of a team that created a radio documentary on the public school system. Our work compelled listeners to donate toward filling the food cabinet of a teacher struggling to feed her hungry students. And one listener offered a college-bound senior living with her drug addicted mother paid tuition. Our work provoked listeners to act. From that moment, I aspired to always generate such movement through journalism.
My motivation as a journalist and sociologist is to be a catalyst for social change through “people reporting” and data analysis.
As noted this morning, the Florida Education Association has filed a lawsuit challenging a state constitutional amendment allowing public money to pay for private school tuition vouchers. From the Palm Beach Post:
The proposed constitutional amendment would effectively lift a century-old provision, dubbed the “Blaine Amendment,” which prohibits tax dollars from directly or indirectly going to religious organizations.
Millions of state dollars are budgeted each year for programs serving foster children, inmates, and low-income and elderly Floridians that are run by religious-affiliated organizations. Supporters of the amendment say they are merely looking to clarify state law, to avoid putting these services at risk.
Florida’s Blaine amendment first gained prominence during the 2006 challenge to the state’s private school voucher program. The First District Court of Appeal ruled that then-Gov. Jeb Bush’s first-in-the-nation statewide program violated the no-aid provision.
Reading Monday’s RAND Corporation study of New York City’s scrapped teacher merit pay system sounded an awful lot like an interview we had last week with Orange County Superintendent Ronald Blocker and his district’s experience with pay-for-performance last decade.
Like all Florida school districts, Orange County is designing a state-mandated merit pay system that bases half a teacher’s performance on standardized testing scores. But Blocker told us his district’s trial run that paid teachers an incentive to work in high-need schools — typically the poorest and lowest-performing schools — did not work.
The reasons Blocker cited were similar to failings in New York City that RAND identified: Teachers did not believe in the system, in part, because they are motivated by more than pay. Blocker said teaching is a calling, and that teachers who do not want to work in troubled schools are not likely to do so because they could earn up to $6,000 more each year.
“Merit pay wasn’t very popular,” Blocker said. “They would work there until they achieved tenure, then they would find some reason to work at a school closer to their home.
“Whatever made you unhappy in the first place is still there, and I think that’s where merit pay misses it. It doesn’t tap the missionary zeal in that teacher.”
States may be wasting time and money attempting to pay teachers based on student performance, undermining a new Florida law requiring merit pay in schools statewide.
Performance-based bonuses neither improve student test scores, nor are the most effective way to motivate educators concluded a RAND Corporation study of a New York City merit pay program.
New York City schools decided to end the three-year program Sunday, which has paid $56 million in bonuses to teachers at more than 200 schools. Florida lawmakers have required school districts to create teacher evaluation and merit pay systems by 2014, and merit pay is favored by federal education officials.
But the RAND study says merit pay failed because teachers did not buy in for a number of reasons:
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