When Florida first approved its private school tax credit scholarship program in 2001, Florida Education Association attorney Ron Meyer said education groups questioned the legality, but no one really objected to helping low-income students get out of low-performing schools. But then the scholarship program started to grow. Lawmakers approved a law that automatically expanded the […]

Students in some of Miami-Dade’s lowest-income schools are more likely to have teachers who are new to the profession, who miss more school time and who receive lower evaluation scores, according to a new analysis by the National Council for Teacher Quality. Washington, D.C.-based NCTQ looked at student and school data by school board district […]

This coming Saturday marks the grand opening for Florida’s 12th state university. Florida Polytechnic University, in Polk County, will offer a tuition-free education focused on science, technology, engineering and math — STEM — to its inaugural class of about 550 students. They start on August 25th. President Randy Avent sat down with Robin Sussingham from […]

Ryan Seashore starts off every CodeNow workshop with a simple request — write out step-by-step instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. A CodeNow teacher pretends to be a robot, and follows the students’ orders exactly as they’re written. Students quickly find that asking a computer to perform an everyday task isn’t so […]

Florida schools are making plans for how to add a state-required extra hour of reading instruction, according to two stories out today. In 2012, lawmakers required that the 100 schools with the lowest scores on the FCAT reading test add an extra hour of reading instruction to try and boost those scores. When the Office […]

Gov. Rick Scott spent Monday touring high-tech South Florida companies looking to hire. He wants to make sure firms like Boca Raton’s Modernizing Medicine, which designs electronic medical record systems, have workers ready. “If you think about – I’ve got kids and even have, hard to believe, I have grandkids – the jobs of the […]

After a long reign as the fastest-growing and most problematic sector in higher education, for-profit colleges are on the ropes. This week the U.S. Department of Education announced that it will review how federal student aid is administered at one of the country’s largest for-profit colleges, the University of Phoenix. Owned by the publicly traded […]

More Florida elementary and middle schools earned an F rating this year, according to preliminary public school grades released Friday. But the number of schools earning the state’s highest rating also increased this year. “The increase in the number of schools earning an ‘A’ this year is great news for students and teachers who have […]

The Florida Department of Education has released practice questions for the new assessments that will replace the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test next year. The tests, which are aligned to the new Common Core-based Florida Standards, are available at the Florida Standards Assessments website.  Some questions are similar to what students might have seen on the […]

Here’s a question: How do you teach a class of all black students in an all black school that Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation decades ago? That isn’t a hypothetical question, but one I remember clearly asking myself. I was teaching American History for the first time in one of our nation’s many […]