Two bills could give Florida students more flexibility in earning their high school diploma.
After years of adding requirements to earn a high school diploma, Florida lawmakers have proposed bills which would allow students more flexibility in how they earn a diploma.
A House proposal (HB 7091) would create three diploma tracks: College and career; industry and scholar. All three diplomas require four years of English language arts.
Students seeking an industry diploma would have to take four math courses, but the only required course is Algebra I and its end-of-course exam. College and career track students must add Geometry. And instead of requiring students pass the Geometry end-of-course exam, the bill would make the test 30 percent of the final grade.
The scholar track adds a requirement for Algebra II and Statistics, or an equally rigorous course.
Rep. Manny Diaz, Jr., R-Hialeah, told the House Education Committee today there are no penalties for districts that don’t comply.
“We’re not looking to penalize districts for this,” Diaz said. “We want to use it as an information gathering tool.”
Rep. Carl Zimmerman, D-Dunedin, supports the bill.
“As a teacher, I can say that my classroom is constantly disrupted,” Zimmerman said. “I think part of it is not just in the volume of tests that are being administered, but in the lack of knowledge of all parties involved on when those tests are being offered.” Continue Reading →
“Student loan debt is now in this country a trillion dollars,” Warren said. “The average debt of students when they get out college is now nearly $30,000, and the average 18- to 24-year-old now uses 30 percent of their income to retire the debt that they’ve accrued.”
A state judge has ruled teacher evaluation component data is exempt from public records laws until a year after the overall evaluation scores are released.
Because the value-added data is developed from an average of three years, Cooper’s order would mean the public would have access only to value-added data that’s at least four years old.
The Times-Union had argued that because the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test data used to calculate value-added figures is public, and the value-added formula is public, the result created when the state crunches the data for teachers should not be exempt.
Gov. Rick Scott and Senate President-Designate Don Gaetz.
Florida’s Senate President says the state’s teacher evaluation system is confusing and should be reworked so teacher ratings more closely match those of the schools they work in.
“We passed that legislation and then we didn’t fund the pay-for-performance system,” Gaetz says. “It seems to me now, that what we need to do is make sure that we sand the rough edges off it, then we institutionalize it, then we help school districts implement it.”
“We grade schools in Florida, and gosh, if you have a C or D school, and you’ve got 90 to 95 percent of teachers in that school rated as effective or highly effective, you’ve got some problems,” Gaetz says. “So, I think there needs to be a hardwired nexus between the performance of schools and whether or not the faculty of that school is deemed to be effective or highly effective or ineffective.”
High school students who want Bright Futures scholarships for college would have less paperwork to submit under a bill being considered in Florida.
With no discussion or fanfare, the Senate Education Committee has approved a bill that would remove a small piece of red tape for students who want to receive Bright Futures scholarships.
Fund Education Now says Florida lawmakers aren't listening to parents who want no part of the Parent Empowerment in Education bill.
As parent trigger legislation again moves through the Florida Legislature, the group Fund Education Now is mad at the lawmakers who revived the bill after its narrow defeat last year.
The Parent Empowerment in Education bill, better known as the parent trigger, would enable parents at chronically failing schools to petition the school board for significant changes.
Options include closing the school, replacing the staff, principal or both or turning the school over to a charter school operator.
The bill is supposed to be about parents, said Fund Education Now co-founder Kathleen Oropeza, but that’s not who is supporting the idea.
“I do think it is important to recognize that not one single authentic Florida parent asked for this bill last year or this year,” she said. “One of the things we fought very hard for last year is for the perspective of authentic Florida parents to be included in the narrative about this legislation.”
Senate President Don Gaetz says federal budget cuts could push Florida face down into a pool of red ink.
Five military bases are located within Senate President Don Gaetz’ Northwest Florida district. Thousands of workers earn their pay at those bases, or from affiliated aerospace and defense companies nearby.
Because President Barack Obama and Congressional leaders failed to reach a compromise to avoid automatic cuts to military spending, Gaetz said, that leaves those workers wondering if they’ll be laid off, furloughed or earn less money this year. The cuts are known as sequestration, and are part of a 2011 deal to raise the nation’s borrowing limit.
Florida lawmakers can’t rely on state projections of a small budget surplus this year until the Congress and the president agree on a budget, said Gaetz, R-Niceville.
“The abject failure of this president and this Congress to even pass a Mother’s Day resolution without having a Hatfield’s and McCoy’s family picnic is the cloud that hangs over the Florida economy and makes it very difficult for us to predict how much money we’ll have to operate,” Gaetz said.
If Don Gaetz gives you a task, he will make sure you get it done.
That’s how Cindy Frakes remembers Gaetz, whom she worked with in the Okaloosa County schools. Gaetz was the superintendent then, in the early 2000s. Frakes was, and still is, a member of the school board.
Gaetz kept a list, Frakes said, and he knew what had been finished and what hadn’t
“He was never going to forget,” she says. “Everybody knew he was coming back. He had a lot of respect.”
The Florida Senate
Florida Senate President Don Gaetz is a former superintendent who wants to revamp career education programs.
Under Gaetz, Okaloosa schools rose from middle of the pack, according to the state’s report card system, to the state’s highest- or second-highest scoring district.
Now Gaetz, a Republican, is president of the Florida Senate. And he is pushing similar changes across Florida.
Gaetz is a former journalist and hospital executive who saw politics as a way to make big changes for schools and health. Gaetz won his first election for school board in 1994. He was elected superintendent in 2000, resigning the post when he won his Senate seat in 2006.
“I learned early on that if you want to do something differently, if you want to do something innovative, generally speaking, there’s a door you have to go through in Tallahassee or Washington to get it done,” he told StateImpact Florida in an interview last week. “I wanted to try and get through the door in Washington or in Tallahassee to do something to improve health care, to do something to improve the educational quality of my own children’s schools.”
Gaetz says Florida is behind schedule, but believes Bennett can ensure schools are ready on time.
“I think we lost a year because the Department of Education sort of flailed around and didn’t implement the standards,” Gaetz says. “I think we could still make up the time.
“Tony Bennett is the new commissioner of education in the state of Florida. He is someone who has proven that he can institutionalize reform and make it work actually in the classroom. So my hope is that we’ll be able to implement the new standards.”
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