Charters are now serving a record 2.3 million students based on estimates from the current school year. But a pro-choice non-profit says Florida school districts are preventing more charters from opening.
Data collected by the Alliance show charter schools now make up more than five percent of public schools in the country.
It took two decades to get there. Most of the growth happened in the last five years.
Since 2007-08, the Alliance reports “the public charter sector has added 1,700 schools – almost a 50 percent increase – and is serving an additional one million students – an increase of 80 percent.”
And when StateImpact Florida asked him what he thinks about a growing conversation to arm public school teachers, he spoke as a former teacher.
“I’m not going to speak as the education commissioner, I’m going to speak as a former science teacher who loved what I did every day teaching science,” Bennett said.
“I didn’t get up in the morning to teach science with ever believing I would need to carry a gun. Okay?
“Now it pains me and it saddens me to think that the society we live in today is so drastically different than it was maybe when I was teaching, but I still hold that value,” he said.
Bennett was the state superintendent in Indiana from 2009-2012 before losing his re-election bid in November. Continue Reading →
Tony Bennett was Superintendent of Public Instruction in Indiana for one term. He lost his re-election bid in November 2012, and was appointed Florida's schools chief by Governor Rick Scott.
Tony Bennett drove from Indiana over the weekend to start his first day as schools chief in Florida today.
Last month the State Board of Education hired Bennett, a Republican who served as Indiana’s Superintendent of Public Instruction for one term.
He lost his re-election bid there after Democrat Glenda Ritz organized a grassroots campaign with help from the teachers union.
Bennett was viewed by some as being too aggressive towards teachers and not showing enough compassion when he pushed new policies, such as merit pay.
StateImpact Florida caught up with Tony Bennett about his plans for education in our state.
Q:Let me first ask you, why did you want to be the Education Commissioner in Florida?
HB 29 would grant any U.S. citizen who graduates from a Florida high school after attending for one year in-state tuition at Florida colleges and universities.
HB 17 would set stricter rules to qualify for in-state tuition. Students would have to attend a Florida high school for four consecutive years to qualify for the lower tuition. HB 11 also mandates dependents of undocumented immigrants who are U.S. citizens also qualify for in-state tuition, but would leave it to the State Board of Education to set the rules.
Florida teachers are benefiting from resources about Common Core through CPALMS.
As states start phasing in Common Core standards in public school classrooms, no Common Core textbooks have been written yet, and new assessments are still being developed.
It’ll cost a fortune, it doesn’t improve the identification of effective teachers, but we need to do it to overcome resistance from teachers and others. Not only will this not work, but in spinning the research as they have, the Gates Foundation is clearly distorting the straightforward interpretation of their findings: a mechanistic system of classroom observation provides virtually nothing for its enormous cost and hassle. Oh, and this is the case when no stakes were attached to the classroom observations. Once we attach all of this to pay or continued employment, their classroom observation system will only get worse…
So, rather than having “figured out what makes a good teacher” the Gates Foundation has learned very little in this project about effective teaching practices. The project was an expensive flop. Let’s not compound the error by adopting this expensive flop as the basis for centrally imposed, mechanistic teacher evaluation systems nationwide.
Florida lawmakers will have to ask themselves how much security the state can afford for schools.
Reinforced entry gates.
School resource officers in elementary schools.
Teachers with guns.
Politicians, pundits and school officials have tossed around ideas how to beef up security since the horrific school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut last month.
The Florida Legislature will be asked to increase security funding for school districts when it convenes in March.
Gates Foundation researchers say they believe schools can accurately assess teacher performance using a statistical formula.
The Gates Foundation says teacher performance can be accurately evaluated using data-based statistical formulas, but the best teacher evaluations also include student ratings and classroom observation.
That’s the conclusions from a three-year, $45 million study of a number of big school districts across the country including Hillsborough County, Charlotte, Dallas, Denver, Memphis, New York City and Pittsburgh.
The most definitive conclusion is likely to be the most controversial. Gates researchers say that a teacher’s so-called value-added scores accurately predict a student’s future performance.
But Gates researchers say value-added is essential to any teacher evaluation.
“The research confirmed that, as a group, teachers previously identified as more effective caused students to learn more,” the report concludes. “Groups of teachers who had been identified as less effective caused students to learn less.”
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