Florida School Boards Association
TALLAHASSEE — Some lawmakers hope to ditch Florida’s controversial new state exams by requiring the Department of Education to instead administer existing national exams, like the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills or the SAT college entrance exam. State education commissioner Pam Stewart rejected the idea when it was originally proposed by Seminole County Public Schools,…
The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) and the School Breakfast Program (SBP) nationwide include a new universal meal service option, the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which has been phased in by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) over the past several years. CEP was created through the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, and allows…
Every year, many state and local public officers and employees receive automatic fines because they file their annual financial disclosure forms late or not at all. The fines are $25 a day, and continue to accrue until the official either files the form, or the fine reaches $1,500—whichever comes first. In addition, recent changes in…
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Florida’s new online standardized test was the target of a cyberattack that caused delays at some schools, officials said Monday. The state’s top law enforcement agency has launched an investigation right as school districts are in the middle of giving the test, based on new standards linked to Common Core. The…
TALLAHASSEE — Nearly 40 percent of Florida’s 2015 high school graduates who took the ACT failed to meet all four of the test’s performance benchmarks predicting success in college. According to data released by the organization that develops the ACT, 130,798 students, or 79 percent of the state’s class of 2015, took the college entrance…
TALLAHASSEE — Among Gov. Rick Scott’s legacies after two terms in office will be the role he plays in the next remake of the state Constitution. Florida’s Constitution allows for a “revision commission” to meet every two decades to propose possible changes to the constitution, and Scott selects 15 of the 37 commissioners and a…
The Newsweek High School Rankings—recognizing the achievements of the best public high schools in the United States for college readiness—have been published for more than a decade. Since 2014, Newsweek has published two separate lists in an effort to address the complexities of assessing the “best” high schools when students’ socioeconomic backgrounds are taken into…
As the back-to-school season sweeps through Southwest Florida, some community members are left questioning if Lee County and Collier County schools are on the right track. And that’s a tough question to answer. State and federal lawmakers want success backed by high-stakes tests. Then there’s the community — businesses, taxpayers and folks who keep a…
TALLAHASSEE—Florida is approaching a rough patch in its path to education reform, as the state prepares to release students’ scores on exams aligned to higher academic standards. In other states where public schools have begun testing using the Common Core standards, students’ double-digit drops in performance jump-started countermovements in which parents and teachers rejected the…
Americans overwhelmingly think there is too much emphasis on standardized testing in public schools and that test scores are not the best way to judge schools, teachers or students, according to a national poll. The results released Sunday come from the 47th annual PDK/Gallup poll of attitudes toward public schools, the longest-running survey of Americans’…