Florida School Boards Association
Every day, 20,000 students miss school in Miami-Dade County. Community leaders on Friday announced a plan to get those students in class — even if it means going door-to-door. “We’re going to have to lace up our boots, come out of our heels and put on some flat shoes,” said school board member Dorothy Bendross-Mindingall.…
DetailsOver the summer, the Florida Legislature agreed to spend $44 million to fund a scholarship program that will award big bonuses to teachers who got high SAT and ACT scores before entering college — even if they took the test decades ago and can somehow locate their scores. The proposal was so, well, kooky, that…
DetailsLast week the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development released the results of a global study looking at the effect of technology on 15-year-olds test scores. The group oversees one of the most important international exams, so their research matters. And the research matters even more to Florida because state law requires schools spend half of their…
DetailsTALLAHASSEE — If parents don’t want their children to take standardized tests, they should send them to private schools, the chair of the House education committee said on Friday. “In public school … you cannot opt out of the tests,” Rep. Marlene O’Toole, a Republican from Lady Lake, told reporters after a committee meeting on…
DetailsFlorida’s education accountability system has lost credibility among too many Floridians to remain effective as-is, Pasco County schools superintendent Kurt Browning said Friday. Without changes, “I think it’s just going to get worse,” said Browning, the only superintendent to attend the state Senate Education Committee’s Thursday hearing on testing. “Whether real or perceived, school administrators,…
DetailsTALLAHASSEE — The Florida Department of Education reviewed two drafts of an ostensibly independent report on the validity of the state’s controversial new exams, and received the final report the night before it was released to the public, a representative of the company that performed the study and state officials said on Thursday. An official…
DetailsTALLAHASSEE — A key state senator said Thursday it’s time to stop harping on the problems that arose during state standardized testing earlier this year because there’s little the Legislature can do to fix it now anyway. Sen. John Legg, who chairs the chamber’s pre-kindergarten to 12th grade education committee, said it’s not worth entertaining…
DetailsTALLAHASSEE — Florida is starting to pull apart as its economy rebounds, as some areas bounce back while other largely rural areas face persitent low wages and poverty. “When things were bad, the whole state was uniformly in a bad situation,” chief state economist Amy Baker told a panel of Senate budget-writers Thursday. “As we…
DetailsGov. Rick Scott’s education team is promising a “historic” increase in per-student spending in Florida schools next year. But to do that, Scott’s advisers want to shift more of the burden of paying for schools from the state to local homeowners through higher property taxes, setting up a new confrontation with the Republican-controlled Senate. “I…
DetailsWith Florida legislative committees getting started, the state School Boards Association is putting the finishing touches on its legislative priority package for the new session. It’s focusing a lot of its attention on testing and accountability as it presents a proposal to members before formal adoption. Some of the ideas have been talked about before,…
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