JMI's Bob Sanchez says the report released by the U.S. Census Bureau wasn't exactly an apples-to-apples comparison of per-student funding among the states.
As the school year is winding down, Florida school districts are looking ahead to next year and the additional funding coming their way.
Almost half a billion dollars is available to boost the salaries of teachers and other personnel. Plus, spending is going up by more than $400 per student.
The totals from the U.S. Census Bureau – including federal revenue – were compiled before Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Legislature cut about $1.3 billion from education funding.
Since then, the state has put about $2 billion back into education, so Florida students may be faring a little better these days.
For example, Florida’s share of per-student spending is going up by more than $400 in the budget year starting in July.
The panel heard an update from Education Commissioner Tony Bennett on three strategic initiatives being carried out over the next year.
The initiatives are part of a reorganization at the Florida Department of Education (FDOE) that involves analyzing every position. A lot of job descriptions may change to accommodate the new initiatives.
For example, jobs related to the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) will change as the FCAT is phased out and new assessments are developed.
But board member Kathleen Shanahan was less concerned about plans for reorganization and more interested in focusing on Common Core State Standards.
“This wave is coming to kill Common Core,” Shanahan said. “I don’t want to be seen as a board lost in reorg.”
“No one is a more aggressive advocate for Common Core than I have been,” Bennett said. “The department (FDOE) is going to deploy more aggressively than any department in the country on Common Core.”
Bennett says the following three initiatives are being carried out as planned, with FDOE taking great care to abide by state and federal statutes. Â Â Continue Reading →
The total K-12 education budget for 2013-14 is $20.3 billion. Per student funding increased more than $400 to $6,779, and $480 million was set aside to boost salaries for teachers and administrators.
Here are more numbers from the Governor’s Office: Â Â Continue Reading →
Gov. Rick Scott vetoed a 3 percent tuition hike and a $14 million college building sought by Senate President Don Gaetz.
Gov. Rick Scott spoke to reporters this afternoon about his decision to cut $368 million out of the $74.5 billion budget sent to him by the Florida Legislature.
“In my case and my wife’s case, we didn’t have parents that could pay for higher education. So the cost of tuition was very significant to us,” Scott said. “I am absolutely committed to keeping tuition low.”
“This is not a political decision. This is a decision for Florida families,” Scott said. “Tuition cannot continue to go up the way it’s been going up.”
Scott said his “filter” in determining whether to veto each item came down to three questions:
Does it help families get more jobs?
Does it improve the state’s education system?
Does it make government more efficient in order to keep the cost of living low?
Scott said he’s asked university and college presidents to think about how they can make sure students get degrees that will result in jobs.
“When they finish, do they have a job? Could they afford their education? How much debt are they going to have? We cannot put our students in a position where they can’t afford higher education,” Scott said.
There’s been a question about whether Scott’s tuition veto is constitutional because it’s not an actual line item. He has to change the budget language that sets student tuition per credit hour.
But Scott said he’ll fight any legal challenge to the veto.
Gov. Rick Scott used his line item veto power to cancel the Florida Legislature's 3 percent tuition hike.
Gov. Rick Scott signed the 2013-14 state budget into law today. He also sent a letter to Secretary of State Ken Detzner explaining his decision to veto a tuition hike.
“We are also holding the line on tuition by vetoing the Legislature’s recommended 3 percent tuition increase on our college and university students,” the governor wrote.
“I believe it is incumbent upon state leaders to ensure the cost of higher education remains accessible to as many Floridians as possible,” Scott said.
“Florida should be proud that we have one of the most affordable high-quality college and university systems in the country,” Scott wrote, “now also offering $10,000 baccalaureate degree programs.”
Editor’s note: This post was authored by Sarah Butrymowicz with The Hechinger Report.
Somewhere midway through his sophomore year of college at Florida Atlantic University, Christopher Clevenger started to question his aeronautical engineering major. He liked the coursework, and was doing well at it, but when he thought about his job prospects, the future seemed bleak.
“It would be me, a computer screen and a phone,” he said. “I didn’t get that human interaction that I craved.”
John O'Connor / StateImpact Florida
University of Central Florida education professor Lee-Anne Spalding uses an interactive white board to shows students how to connect a drill using coins to both math and history. Critics say education programs, such as the one at UCF, have few standards for entry and do not adequately prepare graduates to lead a classroom.
So Clevenger changed track. He was accepted in Nova Southeastern University’s undergraduate teacher training program. On a campus tour, talking with professors and seeing the level of interest they seemed to have in the teacher candidates, Clevenger was sold. He graduated from Nova in November with a degree in secondary social science and is now teaching world history at a high school near Nova’s Fort Lauderdale campus.
Although he switched from a tough major to one that has a reputation of being easy, he stressed that – despite what some people assume―the decision was not because he wanted to earn easy As.
“A lot of students see going into the education world as a fallback…That’s where you get the bad teachers,” he said. “It’s definitely not easy. It’s not something you wake up and do if you’re not passionate about it.”
A national push to improve the quality of teachers has focused largely on those already in the classroom, with the adoption of new teacher evaluation systems and efforts to help struggling teachers and push out those who don’t improve. But increasingly, reformers who believe better teachers will lead to greater student achievement are eyeing how teachers are trained in the first place—and finding training programs lacking.
University of Central Florida elementary education students discuss how to incorporate books, maps, magazines and other materials into lesson plans.
Editor’s note: This post was authored by Sarah Butrymowicz with The Hechinger Report.
Lee-Anne Spalding’s Elementary School Social Studies class at the University of Central Florida had spread out over the room in small groups.
One group of sophomore college students huddled over a set of poetry books, picking out ones they liked. Others gathered around the white board as Spalding demonstrated how to they could embed sounds in their presentations. Spalding had cut into strips a timeline of the civil rights movement and a third group, sitting on the floor, was putting the events back into chronological order.
In part, Spalding was providing content to her students by introducing them to materials they might use – like National Geographic magazines and the poetry books. But she was also modeling teaching strategies, like small group learning, and introducing activities, like the timeline exercise, that she hoped her students would someday mimic.
“You are more likely to use the instructional strategies I’m proposing to you if you actually do it,” she told her students.
UCF is the largest producers of teachers in the state; the university’s education school enrolls more than 2,000 students. It prides itself on being one of the strongest—if not the strongest—teacher training program in Florida, a position it has gained, school officials say, by nimbly responding to changes in the profession. But there is no real way to test that claim. The university, like many education schools across the country, often must rely on anecdotal evidence from principals and graduates to determine that its programs are working, rather than hard data showing students are performing better.
Conventional wisdom holds that many, if not most, education schools are doing a poor job at training teachers; after all, they have a history of taking in some of the lowest performing students, and student achievement in the United States has stagnated. Nationally, education schools have been criticized for being far too easy and, as a result, pumping ill-equipped teachers into the system and harming student achievement. Schools across the country are trying to mitigate the criticism by changing curriculum or increasing the amount of field experience teachers receive.
Florida and several other states are also creating accountability systems so education schools will develop quantitative ways to measure their programs’ success. But for now, teacher preparation remains over-saturated with options―undergraduate degrees, master’s programs, in-school residencies and online courses―that provide little evidence of their effectiveness. And as thousands of Florida’s baby boomer teachers prepare to retire, there is little consensus about how to best train the next generation of teachers.
TaxWatch bills itself as an “independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit public policy research institute and government watchdog.” The group targets 107 items for veto, including some education-related projects.
Just because a project is labeled as a “turkey,” doesn’t mean it’s not a worthwhile expenditure.
“What we’re looking for is that they followed the established budget processes, that the things that were funded were subject to public scrutiny,” said TaxWatch’s Robert Weissert. “That’s not a judgement of the value of the project.”
In other words, these turkeys didn’t go through the normal debate process among lawmakers or the public may not have had a chance to review them.
Here is a sampling of this year’s TaxWatch education turkeys:
Teacher's unions around the country are waiting and watching the Florida Education Association's challenge of the state teacher evaluation law.
The Florida Education Association’s lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state’s test-based teacher evaluations — if successful — could become a model for teacher’s union across the country, Governing magazine reports.
And over at the Quick and the Ed, labor attorney Danny Rosenthal argues the FEA normally would have a difficult time proving the government violated teachers’ 14th Amendment rights. But one of the teachers filing the Florida case was evaluated using students at a different school — a “striking fact” the union has on its side, Rosenthal writes.
The decision could have national implications by setting off a chain reaction of lawsuits testing other teacher evaluation provisions, he says.
Florida districts have yet to develop end-of-course exams for subjects such as art, music or physical education. So some districts used school-wide averages on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test for those teachers. That meant teachers were being rated for the performance of many students they had never taught.
StateImpact seeks to inform and engage local communities with broadcast and online news focused on how state government decisions affect your lives. Learn More »
