Florida School Boards Association
TALLAHASSEE — The Scott administration’s plan to evaluate schools’ performance in 2014-15 without taking into consideration the year-to-year improvement of students is based on an esoteric provision in the state’s education accountability law that lawmakers and school district leaders say is being misused. In 2013, the Legislature amended the state’s law that directs the Department…
DetailsTALLAHASSEE — A state program designed to reward teachers who excel in testing or evaluations is being challenged by a Tallahassee lawyer who says the $10,000 award is being unfairly withheld from many teachers. Tallahassee lawyer Ronald G. Meyer filed a challenge Friday with the state Division of Administrative Hearings, arguing the Florida Department of…
DetailsLess than a year after lawmakers overhauled public-school testing following the botched rollout of the new Florida Standards Assessments, the debate over how to measure student learning is far from over. A leading senator on education issues is working on legislation that would allow schools to use tests other than the statewide standardized exams, which…
DetailsFor the past quarter century, federal education policy has been moving in one direction: toward standards-based education redesign, a greater reliance on standardized tests, and bigger role for Washington when it comes to holding schools accountable for student results. President Barack Obama reversed course with the stroke of a pen Thursday, putting states and districts…
DetailsFlorida education commissioner Pam Stewart’s school grading simulation showed the state would see a similar distribution of A through F marks for 2015 as it saw in 2014. That simple fact led some observers to question how that could be, given the state’s tests and standards were supposed to be more difficult. Since the numbers were…
DetailsTwo Florida school system leaders were recognized for their exemplary leadership by the Consortium of Florida Education Foundations (CFEF) December 3rd at the 70th Annual Joint Conference of Florida School Boards Association and Florida Association of District School Superintendents in Tampa. They were chosen from among several local nominees for championing community and business involvement…
DetailsEvery once in a while, the nerd is elected class president. That can be a good thing, but Florida won’t know for a while. What we do know is that things are going to change in the Florida Senate. Sen. Joe Negron of Stuart is the choice of his Republican colleagues to be Senate president…
DetailsSAN FRANCISCO – Learning how to code has a bit of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde reputation. On the one hand, it promises to be a path to job stability, given that by 2020 some one million computer science jobs will go unfilled in the U.S., according to the Department of Labor. On the other,…
DetailsTwo classrooms at Loften High, two totally different lessons: In one, students in Tina Gennaro’s video game design class are clicking around a computer screen, playing silently with the elements of computer languages like Java, Python and HTML. Across campus, in Lucia Carney’s Spanish class, students are interacting with each other in pairs, taking turns…
DetailsTALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Six years after a group of parents and education advocacy groups first filed a lawsuit that charged the Florida Legislature with shortchanging schools they had their first major moment in court on Monday. During a day-long hearing, Circuit Judge George Reynolds rejected a request by those who filed suit to shut…
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