As you know, we keep tabs on what’s written and said about school choice and ed reform, particularly in Florida. This week has been a doozy when it comes to head-scratching statements. Today we highlight a few and offer a quick response …
In just a few years, Orlando-based Fund Education Now has become the leading parent group in Florida. Aggressive. Media savvy. Super effective. I respect its members for their passion. I sometimes agree with them. But there are times when the rhetoric is at odds with reality.
After this week’s FCAT fiasco, the group wrote in an action alert to members: “These abysmal FCAT Writes scores are proof that Tallahassee’s ‘education reforms’ are an unmitigated disaster.” I agree the state raised the bar too fast and too fast on some of our standardized tests. But have the state’s policies as a whole flat-out bombed?
In the past four years, Florida has ranked No. 11, No. 8, No. 5 and No. 11 among all 50 states in Education Week’s annual Quality Counts report. And contrary to some critics’ claims, that’s not just because of policies on paper that sound good; it’s also because the state has moved the needle on student achievement, particularly for low-income kids. On the K-12 achievement portion of EdWeek’s rating – which considers performance and progress on NAEP, AP and graduation rates – Florida finished at No. 7, No. 7, No. 6 and No. 12 over the past four years. In 2011, it finished in the Top 10 in eight of nine progress categories. It finished in the Top 3 in six of them.
The reason Florida tumbled out of the overall top 10 this year is because of budget cuts, and because its NAEP scores have stalled in reading and math. That’s troubling when the state is still nowhere near where it needs to be. I think that’s what led the state Board of Education to be too bold in raising the bar.
But Florida’s policy makers, like them or not, have been more right than wrong in the past decade when it comes to standards and accountability and school choice. To deny there’s been progress is good for stoking fury and mobilizing troops. But it’s unfair to the teachers who made it happen. And it could undermine changes that really did make things better for kids.
In an op-ed Sunday, syndicated columnist Bill Maxwell describes what he sees as another round of teacher bashing in Florida and blames “conservative lawmakers who dominate Tallahassee” and are gunning to privatize public schools. The prompt for his outrage: A cost-cutting decision by the Pinellas County School District to curb the use of individual printers by teachers. (more…)
As students across the nation apply for entry into their public school districts' magnets, fundamental schools and special academies for the fall, the parade of winners and losers brings to mind The Lottery, Madeleine Sackler's provocative documentary on coveted charter school slots. It is also a reminder that many public schools, just like private ones, can be quite selective in their decisions.
In New York City, for example, the good news this year is the percentage of black and Latino students accepted into eight specialized high schools increased by 14 percent. That's encouraging, but the racial makeup of Stuyvesant High School, with four Nobel Laureates among its graduates and a student body that is only 1.2 percent black, is a reflection of the imbalance that remains.
In Pinellas County, a school district of 101,000 students on Florida’s Gulf Coast, 4,787 incoming kindergartners applied for 846 seats in the district’s magnet and fundamental schools. “I don't know how I got to be so lucky,” one parent of a sixth-grader told the Tampa Bay Times. “I feel like I won the lottery. This is better than money." In Brevard County, on Florida's Atlantic Coast, school officials are considering a plan to improve lottery odds by the unsual strategy of removing the preference they give for families wanting to keep brothers and sisters together. “For families like mine,” one mother told Florida Today, “we’ve counted on both of our children going to the same school.” (more…)
