Florida School Boards Association
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…
A weak economy appears to have at least one upside: Schools are able to hire more effective teachers, according to new research. Teachers hired during recessions were significantly more effective, as judged by their students’ performance on standardized tests, than teachers hired during better economic times, according to working paper published this week by the…
The school day for gymnast Tyler Harriman begins shortly after 6 a.m. He squeezes in two hours of classes online before heading to the gym for a full day of practice. When he returns home at 5 p.m., Tyler said, “I eat dinner, take a shower and go and do school until about 10 p.m.”…
If there was a hot education topic in Florida this spring, it was student testing. But not in the state House of Representatives. There, under the guidance of K-12 Committee Chairwoman Janet Adkins, the talk focused on collared shirts and khaki shorts. Citing the need to improve school security, Adkins sought to persuade districts to…
They might ridicule the idea. But plenty of Florida teachers have contacted their districts, the state Department of Education and, yes, even reporters who have written about the new Best and Brightest scholarship asking how they could get theirs. Even for a year, up to $10,000 is nothing to sneeze at, after all. (The amount…
In Beyond Fiction, we outlined why devoting instructional time to informational reading was as important to building literacy skills as reading fiction texts— a fact that was made all too clear in international benchmarks and national surveys which showed American adults performing abysmally on document or informational literacy. How to help adults who lack these basic…
While we’re on the subject of what today’s students need to be successful in the future, the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research recently released a comprehensive review of what research, policy and practice have identified as crucial elements of a child’s development and growth into a mature, productive and thriving adult. Read…