Florida School Boards Association
The push to overhaul Florida’s testing system is regaining momentum with a proposal to replace the new Florida Standards Assessments with tried and true national exams. Seminole County school district leaders, who launched the effort this summer, suggest the national tests would be less time-consuming and easier to implement. The FSAs can take up to…
TALLAHASSEE—Students in some Florida districts are already back in school, but their administrators and teachers still don’t have the results from last school year’s state exams. After technical problems disrupted this spring’s computer-based state exams, the first administration of tests based on Florida’s version of the Common Core standards, Gov. Rick Scott and the state…
Did you know that switching to paperless board meetings could help your organization save money, time and become more effective for as little as $2,900 per year? FSBA proudly endorses BoardDocs board management solutions. As the pioneer of eGovernance, BoardDocs has helped over 1,300 organizations dramatically lower costs, increase transparency and reduce the time spent…
This past spring, 5 million students from third grade through high school took new, end-of-year tests in math and English that were developed by a consortium of states known as PARCC. It’s a big deal because these tests are aligned to the Common Core learning standards, and they’re considered harder than many of the tests…
Florida school districts will have a new way to track the financial and academic records of charter school operators. For the first time, a new database is connecting charter schools to who runs them. The goal is to reduce the number of charter schools that close. The National Association of Charter School Authorizers wants to…
Alpine Testing Solutions, the firm conducting Florida’s testing validity study, reports that its work should be completed by the Sept. 1 deadline that lawmakers set. The group has received much of the documentation it requested, and conducted several interviews in gathering information to help reach findings. One area where Alpine has requested more specifics is…
A new teacher-bonus program slipped into the state budget at the 11th hour is prompting criticism, and even outrage, among educators. Under the Best and Brightest Teacher Scholarships, as many as 4,402 teachers statewide can get an individual $10,000 bonus if their ACT or SAT scores are in the top 20th percentile. Teachers must also…
Students who are considered homeless by Florida schools can be living in hotels, trailer parks, in campgrounds or doubled up with friends or relatives. And with as many as 71,000 or more homeless students in the state the challenges can extend beyond the kids and families to include the schools. For most kids school is…
Teachers can’t hotfoot it out of Kansas fast enough, creating a substantial shortage expected only to get much worse. Why? Well, there’s the low pay. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average teaching salary in 2012-2013 (the latest year for which data were available, in constant 2012-2013 dollars), was $47,464, lower than the pay…