5th grade teacher Beverley Dowell says she hopes the Governor “isn’t trying to buy teacher votes” when he suggested every full-time teacher in the state get a pay raise before their evaluation results come in.
Most districts won’t start identifying, and potentially removing, low-performing teachers from their schools until next year. But Governor Rick Scott said he wants to give every full-time teacher in the state a pay raise now.
“For a while now we’ve been hearing how bad we are,” said Beverley Dowell, a 5th grade teacher at Treasure Island Elementary School in Miami-Dade. “[That] we need to weed out bad teachers, there’s so many bad teachers.”
“On one hand you’re cleaning us out of the system, on the other hand you’re going to reward us with $2,500 because according to the Governor we truly deserve it,” Dowell said. “We have to be concerned.”
“How can you have a C or D ranked school in which 85 percent, or 90 or 95 percent of the teachers are classified as effective or highly effective?” Gaetz told the Associated Press. “It seems to me that those two data points have to have some relationship to each other.”
It’s a question the Tampa Bay Times also looked at on Sunday, asking how Pinellas County schools earning the state’s highest report card grades could have relatively low school-wide teacher evaluation scores?
Akshay Desai resigned from the State Board of Education to focus on his struggling health care company.
Gov. Rick Scott filled three slots on the State Board of Education Thursday, reappointing John Padget of Key West and appointing Ada Armas of Coral Gables and John Colon of University Park.
On Feb. 25, leaders from the Florida Legislature will be answering your questions at a Town Hall on Session 2013, an event sponsored by Global Integrity.
Education is a big part of the conversation. From teacher pay to charter school funding laws, you can ask Florida lawmakers what their education priorities will be during the upcoming legislative session.
RSVP to join WLRN and The Miami Heraldon Monday, Feb. 25th at 6:30pm for the live, free event at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale.
The bill adds more restrictions to closed charter schools and requires charter schools to post their board, management firm and some spending online.
The bill also requires school districts to turn over empty buildings formerly used for K-12 education to charter schools at no cost. Charter schools must pay for maintenance or reimburse the school district for the cost.
“This is not a finished product,” Rep. George Moraitis, Jr., R-Fort Lauderdale, said. “We’re still open to changes as we move forward in the process.”
The bill allows charter schools to use empty school district facilities. Charter schools would have to pay for maintenance, or reimburse the district for maintenance.
The 36-page bill would also prohibit a shuttered charter school from spending more than $10,000 without the prior written permission of the school board or other sponsor, with some exceptions.
Charter school employees would not be allowed to serve on the charter school’s governing board.
Those requirements are a direct result of a case from Orlando.
The foundation’s goal is for 60 percent of Americans to earn a high-quality post secondary credential or degree by 2025. Merisotis took questions from the audience.
Q: Does the Lumina Foundation have a position on how the university systems should price their services? In my day, the university system priced its tuition on a quarterly basis, so we took all the hours we could take per quarter. We all finished in four years flat. What do you say about that – do we need to go back?
A: You bet. There are two sides to this financing equation – two elements that you’ve got to address when you’re dealing with the issues of redesigning the financing system.
One side is the cost side, which is getting more productivity out of the enterprise. What I mean is literally increasing the capacity of the system to serve more people better.
Today is Digital Learning Day, an effort to raise awareness about the benefits of integrating more technology into education.
Today is Digital Learning Day, part of an effort to put more emphasis on the possibilities computers, the Internet and new technology offer to improve education.
Advocates argue access and customization are the biggest advantages to digital instruction. Students often find digital instruction more engaging — pull out those smart phones and Wi-Fi enabled iPods, students — and the materials can be more interactive and easily updated.
But Florida lawmakers believe in the advantages of digital learning and have required schools to deliver half of their instruction digitally beginning in the fall of 2015. The state requires students to take one online course in order to graduate high school. Florida students are also more likely to take a standardized test on a computer than in other states.
Lumina Foundation president and CEO Jamie Merisotis. He says the number of Floridians earning higher education degrees is not keeping pace with job openings.
The percentage of Floridians earning college degrees is not increasing fast enough to keep pace with the job market, according to the head of a foundation working to boost higher education graduates.
That’s what Jamie Merisotis, president and CEO of the Lumina Foundation, told the Economic Club of Florida last week.
“It’s an urgent need,” Merisotis said and nearly every state is far from that goal.
“Here in Florida, according to the most recent data, 37 percent of the state’s working age residents (ages 25 to 64) have at least a two-year college degree,” Merisotis said. “That figure is virtually unchanged over the course of the last four years.”
That means the rates are flat in Florida, and “when it comes to educational progress, flat is actually frightening. That’s because educational success is increasingly linked to economic prosperity.”
Lumina’s strategic plan, Goal 2025, is to have 60 percent of Americans holding a high quality post secondary degree, certificate or other credential by 2025.
The Lumina Foundation is a donor to Florida C.A.N., which supports StateImpact Florida.
Michelle Rhee, the education firebrand/lightning rod who is the former chancellor of Washington, D.C. public schools, sat down for an interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show last night.
Rhee founded education advocacy group StudentsFirst. Rhee has advised Florida Gov. Rick Scott. She is known for vociferously challenging teacher’s unions and promoting policies
Stewart particularly questioned Rhee about her treatment of teachers and the effect on professional morale. Stewart also asked if it was fair to minimize the effect of poverty and upbringing on student achievement, as Rhee’s brand of “no excuses” school policies often do.
The wave of new education policies, Stewart said, have left teachers feeling like a football team forced to adjust each time a new offensive is brought in.
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