Education Commissioner Tony Bennett is under criticism for emails revealing he worked to change Indiana's school grading system in 2012.
The Foundation for Florida’s Future and Michael Petrilli, writing at The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, are defending Florida Education Commissioner Tony Bennett’s decision to change Indiana’s school grading formula while leading Hoosier State schools in 2012.
The change boosted a notable charter school to an A grade from an initial C grade. Emails published by the Associated Press showed Bennett and staff scrambling to find a solution and concerned about the fallout if they didn’t.
Bennett said he was trying to preserve the integrity of the state’s formula. In a statement, foundation director Patricia Levesque said Bennett fixed an error:
“Commissioner Bennett and his department found and corrected a mistake that would have unfairly penalized 13 schools missing data for grades they did not even serve. They fixed a problem to be accurate and fair – any accusation otherwise is false and politically motivated.
“A-F school grading empowers parents to know how well schools are serving their children, in a transparent and easy to understand way. In 2012, Indiana was in its first year of its new school grading calculation, and there is always a learning process when implementing a policy new to a state.
“The best thing to do is to lay out the facts, which is what Commissioner Bennett is doing. Political attacks will come and go. The focus must remain on ensuring every student has access to a high-quality education that prepares them for success.”
Bennett now leads Florida schools and defended the change. The school, Christel House Academy, initially earned a C, but Bennett said Christel House performed as well as other A-rated charter schools.
Florida pioneered the A-through-F grading system for schools as a way to give parents a simple representation of school performance. Former Gov. Jeb Bush has traveled the country pitching the idea to other states.
And the system is constantly being tweaked to add or emphasize components of the formula (more on that later).
But It’s far less likely that Florida’s school grading formula could be adjusted to change the results of select schools. That’s because school districts usually come up with similar grades working independently from the state Department of Education.
That’s because no school grade could drop by more than one letter grade this year. School superintendents asked for the protection because more than 30 factor in the formula have changed the past two years.
So which district benefited the most from the safety net?
Statewide 17.2 percent of schools avoided a larger drop. Most of the state’s large districts — Orange, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Hillsborough — bested that average.
Small rural and midsized districts — Citrus, Charlotte and Lake, for instance — had the highest percentage of safety net schools (though low numbers of schools in some districts mean a large percentage of schools qualified.)
Education Commissioner Tony Bennett stands by a 2012 decision to alter the grade of an Indiana charter school.
Florida Education Commissioner Tony Bennett stands by his decision to boost the grade of an Indiana charter schools in 2012, when Bennett was the Hoosier State’s elected superintendent.
The Associated Press published emails Monday which showed Bennett and his staff discussed ways to boost the grade of Christel House charter school after learning the school’s initial grade was a C according to the Indiana school grading formula.
U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio is the highest-profile Florida Republican to oppose Common Core State Standards.
Add U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida to those opposing shared education standards fully adopted by Florida and 44 other states.
The standards, known as Common Core, have been under fire from those on the political right and left. Conservatives argue the federal government coerced states with money to adopt the standards, undermining local control of education. Those on the left protest increased testing.
“Common Core started out as a well-intentioned effort to develop more rigorous curriculum standards,” Rubio told the Tampa Bay Times. “However, it is increasingly being used by the Obama Administration to turn the Department of Education into what is effectively a national school board. This effort to coerce states into adhering to national curriculum standards is not the best way to help our children attain the best education. Empowering parents, local communities and the individual states is the best approach.”
Lauren Case already knows what she’s going to say on the first day of school when her students ask what she did over summer break:
“I saw a rocket launch; it was awesome. You want to go too? Maybe you should become an engineer,” says Case, a 10th grade science teacher at South Fork High School in Stuart, Fla.
Lockheed Martin-NSTA Teacher Fellows Mary Maddox and Steve Kirsche watch the MUOS-2 satellite launch.
The fellowship is designed to take science teachers who have only been in the classroom for a couple of years and expose them to real-world applications of STEM—science, technology, engineering and math—so that, hopefully, they can bring the enthusiasm back to their students.
Editor’s note: Names of teachers and students have been changed.
Are search engines really more complicated than children?
That question occurred to me last week when the annual earnings report for Yahoo! came out and it became clear that CEOs are cut a lot more slack than teachers are.
New Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer was hired with much fanfare last year and tasked with turning the company around (or at least bringing it out of the doldrums in relation to its competitors). She just finished her first year so I expected these revenue numbers were going to tell us whether she was doing a good job or not
It turns out that Yahoo! revenue was down — 7 percent as compared to the same point the year before. If advertising commissions were taken out of the revenue numbers, it was a 1 percent decline.
And revenue in the private sector is the bottom line, right? So I guess Marissa Mayer was a failure.
Not according to Yahoo! Mayer wasn’t fired. Her salary wasn’t cut. In fact, it was supplemented.
The Florida Department of Education released 2013 elementary and middle school grades, part of the state’s school accountability system. The data includes each component of the school’s score and demographic data. Continue reading →
Opponents of Common Core standards have written a letter responding to five former Republican Party of Florida chairmen.
Earlier this week we published an email sent to Florida Republicans urging their support for Common Core State Standards fully adopted by Florida and 44 other states. The letter was signed by five former Republican Party of Florida chairmen, including American Conservative Union chairman Al Cardenas.
Common Core opponents have written a rebuttal.
“It is quite astonishing to see supposedly conservative Republicans argue that a centralized ‘solution’ to education problems is better than one crafted at the state and local level,” Jane Robbins with the American Principles Project wrote. “But that’s the case with the letter written by former Republican leaders in Florida, urging the GOP to support the Common Core national school standards.”
The exhibit hall at FETC, an annual education technology conference in Orlando.
The August issue of Scientific American takes a look at the possibilities of high-tech education.
The magazine’s editors argue that the rising demand for higher education and shrinking budgets are forcing schools to deploy new tools and methods for students.
What is driving this digital revolution? One factor is that schools and universities are under greater pressure than ever before. More and more students are pursuing higher levels of education at a time when budget-strapped principals and universities cannot hire the staff they need. At the same time, governments and institutions (prodded by employers) are raising standards for what students should know at every stage of school.
Many see technology as a solution. But skeptics think it improves little on what teachers can do and poses a threat to student privacy.
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