That’s not the tagline for a new documentary about the Common Core State Standards, but it could be based on a trailer posted online.
The documentary, “Building The Machine,” is scheduled for a February release and features many prominent critics. That includes Sandra Stotsky and Ze’ev Wurman, who testified at a series of Florida public meetings on the standards in October.
The trailer also features footage of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is a prominent Common Core advocate.
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.
Welcome to Florida, where all the teachers are above-average.
Why are we doing this again?
That’s a question people are asking around the state after seeing the second statewide batch of teacher evaluation data this week.
Nearly 98 percent of teachers earned ratings of “highly effective” or “effective.” And the percentage of teachers earning the top rating increased to one in three statewide from one in five teachers the prior year.
“Across the state, 98 percent of teachers rank in the top two categories — a figure that should be reassuring,” they wrote. “Yet the high number of failing schools — despite all those “highly effective” teachers — continues to be troublesome.”
The Florida Department of Education released some administrator evaluation data for the 2012-13 school year on Dec. 3. The evaluations were required by a 2011 law. Continue reading →
The Florida Department of Education released some teacher evaluation data for the 2012-13 school year on Dec. 3. The evaluations were required by a 2011 law. Continue reading →
The Florida Department of Education released some teacher evaluation data for the 2012-13 school year on Dec. 3. The evaluations were required by a 2011 law. Continue reading →
About one-third of teachers earned the top rating of “highly effective,” up from 23 percent of teachers last year. About 66 percent were rated “effective,” the largest category this year.
And the percentage of teachers earning the lowest ratings declined. This year, 1.4 percent of teachers were rated “needs improvement.” Last year 2.1 percent of teachers earned a “needs improvement rating.
Just two of every 1,000 teachers were rated “unsatisfactory,” about the same rate as last year.
About 14 percent of teachers have yet to be rated.
The PISA exam is given to 15-year-olds once every three years.
The latest U.S. results on an international math, science and reading test are ‘sobering,’ experts said, and show the average U.S. student continues to lose ground against those around the globe.
Overall, the U.S. finished 17th in reading, 21st in science and 26th in math. That’s largely because U.S. scores were flat while other countries raised their scores.
Locally, the results on the Program for International Student Assessment show the average Florida student scored about the same as the average U.S. student in science and reading. However, Florida average math scores trailed the U.S. average.
And in all three subjects, Florida had a lower percentage of top-scoring students than Massachusetts and Connecticut and had a higher percentage of low-performing students than those states.
Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, told NPR the results show the U.S. needs to make some big changes to its education system. Improving countries, such as Vietnam, are not as tradition-bound as the U.S.
“The current education reform agenda in the United States has not worked,” Tucker said.
This year’s PISA results will break out the performance of U.S. states, so that we might know how Florida matches up with the rest of the world. PISA is also useful because researchers analyze common trends among the top-performing countries to figure out which policies might have more impact on student performance.
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.
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