Indiana Superintendent of Public Education Tony Bennett has been selected to be Florida Commissioner of Education.
Citing his experience at many levels of education and his work on new, national Common Core standards, the State Board of Education unanimously chose Tony Bennett as Florida’s next education commissioner.
Board members said there will be no learning curve for Bennett when he takes over in Florida.
“I think Tony’s experience in being a teacher, a superintendent, a coach and a statewide elected leader brought a lot more real-time, real recent experience in terms of where we need to get to,” said board member Kathleen Shanahan.
Bennett lost his reelection bid to remain Indiana’s superintendent last month. Teachers opposed him for pushing test score-based evaluations, paying teachers based on those evaluations and other policies. Conservative voters opposed Common Core, which they believe will reduce local authority over education.
The cost of sending this little guy to a 4 year university is almost $54,000 through the Florida Prepaid College Plan.
The cost of a prepaid, 4-year university plan for a newborn in Florida has climbed more than 350 percent in the last six years.
That’s what Gov. Rick Scott heard during a presentation Tuesday by the Florida Prepaid College Board.
In 2006-07, the prepaid cost for 4-year university tuition and fees was $14,616. Now, it’s $53,729, which comes out to $332 a month over 18 years.
“More than 50 percent of the families in our state make less than $50,000 a year,” Scott told reporters Tuesday. “Prepaid being almost $54,000 is a big drain.”
Sagette Van Embden / Florida Center for Investigative Journalism
Wendy Pedroso did well in math classes -- until her first algebra course. Twice as many students at Florida colleges took a remedial math course than took a remedial writing or reading course.
Wendy Pedroso has never liked math, but for most of elementary school and middle school she got B’s in the subject. It wasn’t until ninth grade at Miami Southwest Senior High School, when Pedroso took algebra, that she hit a wall. In particular, she struggled with understanding fractions.
“I kept getting stuck in the same place,” Pedroso, 20, recalled recently. She failed the class, and worried that she’d never get to go to college. Pedroso sought help from tutors, took algebra again over the summer and passed. She went on to graduate from high school in 2011.
Pedroso enrolled at Miami Dade College’s campus in Kendall. Like all of Florida’s community and state colleges, Miami Dade accepts anyone with a high school diploma or G.E.D. But students must take a placement test to assess their basic skills. Pedroso’s struggles with math caught up with her again: She failed the math section of the test.
It meant that she had to take a remedial math class. The course cost Pedroso $300 like any other class at Miami Dade College but did not count as credit toward graduation. Although she could take college-level courses in other subjects, Pedroso couldn’t begin taking college-level courses in math until she passed the remedial course.
Pedroso was embarrassed.
“I thought that it was going to be very hard to get through college,” she said.
Across Florida, remedial classes at community and state colleges are full with students like Pedroso. More than half of the high school graduates who took the college placement test had to take at least one remedial class. And while many of those students struggle with basic reading and writing skills, the subject they’re most unprepared for in college is math.
In the 2010-11 school year, some 125,042 Florida college students needed to take a remedial math class, an investigation by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and StateImpact Florida has found. That number has been growing for some time, and is more than double the number requiring remedial classes in reading (54,489) or writing (50,906).
The Florida Department of Education released some administrator evaluation data for the 2011-12 school year on Dec. 5. This is the first time the state has released data for the new administrator evaluations. Continue reading →
Collier County schools superintendent Kamela Patton was one of those unhappy with the errors. She was also concerned that some districts have yet to report evaluation — amounting to about one-quarter of all teachers in the state.
Patton said school districts are open to changing education policy, according to the Naples Daily News, but that the state needs to get things sorted. From the story
“We keep saying to the state, we’re never against your thoughts, but get it right,” Patton said during a meeting with the Daily News’ editorial board.
Among concerns she mentioned was the fact that the largest district in the state — Miami-Dade County — is not included in the initial data. The data released Wednesday is preliminary and the district has yet to report its information to the state.
Patton also said, however, that a portion of the system aimed at determining a teacher’s impact on student learning — the so-called value-added model — appears to have worked.
Tony Bennett, Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction, at Wednesday's Indiana State Board of Education meeting.
Next week the State Board of Education will interview finalists to become the next Florida education commissioner.
Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett, who lost his reelection bid, is one of three finalists and thought the front-runner for the post because of his ties to former Gov. Jeb Bush.
As a guy who is a Hoosier through and through, who spent all but one year of his professional life in Indiana, I had to ask myself how important it was to balance that issue between loving the role of state school chief and driving education policy for children of a state versus living in Indiana. And I don’t believe there are any other states in the country better than Florida to do what I love to do. I’m excited about it, but will it will be hard? Of course it’ll be hard. But on January 11, I have to make a pretty quick emotional and intellectual pivot. And that emotional and intellectual pivot is I have to put Indiana in my rear-view mirror if I’m selected. And I have to underscore, ‘if I’m selected’…
I’m thrilled that the opportunity exists, and I hope the opportunity works out. I hope that on [December] 12 that we have the opportunity to serve the state of Florida, and the children of Florida more importantly than anything.
The interview sheds light on the relationship between Bennett and Bush and also is interesting in hindsight for Bennett’s views on the political issues that may have led to his defeat in Indiana. The Q&A, after the jump.
Most people have heard about the problems with teacher evaluations or school report cards, but we've found errors in other state data as well.
Wednesday the Florida Department of Education unveiled statewide teacher evaluation data, part of a new law that overhauls how teacher performance is measured in Florida.
The agency held a press conference by phone to discuss the accomplishment.
And then the data quietly disappeared that afternoon.
The Florida Department of Education released some teacher evaluation data for the 2011-12 school year on Dec. 5. This is the first time the state has released data for the new mandatory teacher evaluations. Continue reading →
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