Private schools. What happens to private school records when private schools close? Sometimes, they disappear. Palm Beach Post.

Charter schools. The Broward school district is taking a closer look at how much it charges charter schools for bus transportation after a citizens task force complains the district is losing money on the deal and subsidizing the competition. Miami Herald. (The district is considering other ways to reduce busing costs, too, reports the South Florida Sun Sentinel.) A K-8 charter school that teaches boys and girls separately is proposed for Palm Beach Gardens, reports the Palm Beach Post.

School choice. The Palm Beach district gets 17,500 applications for about 9,000 district choice seats. Palm Beach Post.

Digital education. Florida's mandates on digital offerings brings opportunities and challenges, editorializes the Palm Beach Post.

Privatization. The Volusia school district is right to consider outsourcing custodial services to save money, editorializes the Daytona Beach News Journal. The move could save about $5 million a year, the News Journal reports.

Florida's progress. Matt Di Carlo at the Shanker Blog: "Again, Governor Bush and supporters of his reforms have some solid evidence to draw upon when advocating for the Florida reforms, particularly the grade-based accountability system. The modest estimated effects in these high-quality analyses are not as good a talking point as the “we quadrupled the number of A-rated schools in six years” argument, but they are far preferable to claiming credit for what’s on the scoreboard after having changed the rules of the game."

Pace of change. Sweeping changes to teacher evaluations, academic standards and testing have district officials on edge and lawmakers considering changes. Tallahassee Democrat. (more…)

Florida's status. Matt Reed, Florida Today's editorial page editor, takes a look at NAEP data and the most recent Education Week Quality Counts report and concludes: "We obviously have room to improve. But our system is neither starving, as educators always say. Nor is it “broken” or “failing,” as reformers keep telling us."

Florida's status, Part II. Diane Ravitch's latest take, after quoting a Florida teacher at length: "There is no Florida miracle. Education has only gotten worse over the past few years, no matter how schools, districts and the state itself game the system. And, contrary to what the media will tell you, it is NOT teachers’ fault, unions’ fault, and I won’t even blame it on the kids or their parents this time. It is the fault of education “reform” led by Jeb Bush et al."

Charter schools. The South Florida Sun Sentinel writes up the bill that would require school districts to share unused or underused facilities with charter schools. Bad idea, editorializes the Palm Beach Post.

Gays and lesbians. The Lake County School Board considers rules that would keep a Gay-Straight Alliance from forming at a middle school. Orlando Sentinel.

Teacher evaluations. Tampa Bay Times on one impact (or not) of the new system in Hillsborough: "After years of planning and training, observation and deliberation, the first wave of firings has begun under a teaching-improvement project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The tally: Three teachers." (more…)

Top 10 again. Education Week ranks Florida No. 6 this year in its annual Quality Counts report. redefinED. Orlando Sentinel. Associated Press.

Teacher evals. StateImpact Florida writes about the new Gates study on the best way to identify the best teachers. SchoolZone notes it. Jay P. Greene rips it. District officials in Palm Beach County don’t feel good about the new, state-mandated system, reports the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

Common Core. Reformers have to win the messaging battle, writes Mike Thomas at the EdFly Blog: “Our success in passing school reforms has had more to do with prevailing in legislative bodies than prevailing in the public arena. This has led to a dangerous neglect of the need for marketing. We now are paying the price for that as our opponents vigorously fight back, defining reform as an attack on public schools that is degrading the quality of education. That this isn’t true doesn’t matter. Sound bites often trump data.”

Rezoning retreat. After affluent parents complain, Seminole district officials back away from plans to equalize the number of low-income students at each school. Orlando Sentinel.

Fire them. Hillsborough Superintendent MaryEllen Elia recommends firing two aides and demoting a principal and assistant principal in the aftermath of the drowning of a special needs student. Tampa Bay Times. Tampa Tribune.

More school safety. Tampa Bay Times. StateImpact Florida. Panama City News Herald. (more…)

Standardized test costs. They total about $1.7 billion a year nationwide, according to a new report from Brookings that includes state-by-state figures. Not much, concludes researcher Matt Chingos, who adds “perhaps we’re spending less than we should.” Coverage from Education Week and Huffington Post. Former Florida education commissioner Gerard Robinson tells the latter about test anxiety: “I won't pretend that tests don't matter and there's no anxiety -- but I also tell people there's anxiety with sex. There's anxiety with sex, but there isn't any talk about getting rid of that.”

And still more Jeb summit coverage. Politic365 on the “Florida Formula.” EdFly Blog on the crucial center. Rick Hess on "The Common Core Kool-Aid."

More protests from Hillsborough parents. They want better training for employees who work with special-needs children, StateImpact Florida reports. More from Tampa Bay Times.

What does Rick Scott want? Orlando Sentinel columnist Beth Kassab on the possibility of Tony Bennett coming to Florida: “Indiana's loss could be Florida's gain. Then again, it will all depend on whether the state board and the governor are looking for somebody to push Florida forward or somebody to soften Scott's image on education reform. There are worrisome signs that Scott is looking for the latter.” Two knocks don’t make a pattern, but this is the second time in a month Scott has been criticized from the reform side.

Joining the chorus. Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts says the state Board of Education lowered the bar for minority students when it adopted short-term achievement goals that called for steeper rates of improvement for those students.

Tax credit scholarships and religious schools. The Orlando Sentinel takes a look at a long-established fact - the majority of students receiving tax-credit scholarships attend religious schools – and critics recycle myths about funding and accountability.

State settles with Christian college. From the News Service of Florida: “Settling a federal lawsuit that involved questions about the school's "secular purpose," state education officials will allow students at a Central Florida Christian college to be eligible for a popular grant program.” Complaint here. Settlement here.

Charter school analysis. News outlets continue to highlight UCF Professor Stanley D. Smith’s analysis, which finds that as a group, charter schools in Florida under perform traditional public schools. Smith writes an op-ed for the Tampa Bay Times. The St. Augustine Record uses his findings as a basis for this editorial. (more…)

Oklahoma: The state supreme court tosses out a lawsuit challenging a voucher program for special needs students, saying the two school districts that filed suit did not have standing (The Oklahoman).

Indiana: The state supreme court hears arguments over the constitutionality of the state's fledgling voucher program (Indianapolis Star). Enrollment in the state's voucher program skyrockets in year two (Huffington Post).

Colorado: The Colorado State Court of Appeals hears the appeal over the Douglas County voucher program (Denver Post).

Louisiana: The state's voucher program heads to court this week (thetowntalk.com).

Georgia: In the wake of election victories, school choice supporters aim to expand the state's tax credit scholarship program (Atlanta Journal Constitution).

Florida: Incoming House Speaker Will Weatherford creates a new school choice and innovation committee to ensure choice issues don't get lost in the general education discussion (redefinED). (more…)

Charter school critics got a lot of mileage from a U.S. Government Accounting Office report last summer that found charter schools enrolled fewer students with disabilities than traditional public schools. But a new report (hat tip: EdWeek) offers even more reason why we should all take a more careful look before leaping to conclusions.

The Center for Reinventing Public Education found the numbers for middle and high schools in New York state were on par between the two sectors. And while fewer students with disabilities were enrolling in charter elementary schools, that didn't mean discrimination. Wrote the center:

The fact that only charter elementary schools systematically enroll lower proportions of students with disabilities than their district-run counterparts calls into question whether discrimination drives lower enrollment. There is no obvious reason to think that charter elementary leaders would be more likely to discriminate than charter middle and high school leaders. Indeed, the fact that state testing does not begin until the third grade suggests that elementary schools have arguably the weakest incentives to discriminate against students with disabilities. The grade-span differences highlight a need to examine what is different about the policies and practices of special education and the preferences of parents with students with disabilities at the elementary grades versus the upper grades. Many causes other than discrimination could be affecting enrollment.

It may be that charter schools are simply less likely to identify students as having disabilities that qualify them for special education in the first place, or that specialized preschool programs with designated district feeder schools lead parents to opt for the district school over the charter school. Or it may be that federally mandated district counseling for families of kids with disabilities creates opportunities for the district to encourage these families to stay in district-run schools, whereas non–special education students’ families never get such advice. None of these potential contributors to elementary level underenrollment in charter schools have been explored sufficiently, if at all.

The GAO report was written about widely, from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal to outlets in Florida. It'll be interesting to see what kind of coverage the new report gets.

A “B” for teacher quality policies. That’s Florida’s grade, according to the National Center for Teacher Quality. That’s higher than any other state, notes the Gradebook.

Bang for the buck. Florida students made some of the biggest gains in the nation on NAEP despite some of the smallest increases in ed funding, notes researcher Matthew Ladner at Jay P. Greene’s Blog.

Lawmakers’ ties to charter schools. WFTV in Orlando takes a look. The Tampa Bay Times did a similar but more detailed story last year.

Charter school facilities funding. The Fort Myers News Press takes a look at a task force’s recommendation to increase property taxes to pay for building construction and maintenance at charter schools. Redefined covers the Florida Charter Schools Conference where this was a topic yesterday.

Report on charter school growth. Miami Herald. StateImpact Florida. redefinED.

Promising charter on its way to Pinellas. With little comment, the Pinellas school board voted 7-0 Tuesday for a charter school application that dovetails with a legal settlement over black student achievement. Lots of history here; I wrote a bit about this earlier this week.

More questions in special needs student’s death. Tampa Bay Times.

(Image from simplystatedbusiness.com)

Teacher’s aides put on leave. Five of them, in Hillsborough, as the district investigates the death of a special needs middle school student and a PE coach accuses them of slacking on the job, reports the Tampa Bay Times. Says Hillsborough Superintendent MaryEllen Elia: "We have to do everything we can to retain and regain the confidence of parents who entrust us with their children." In Broward, meanwhile, the district plans to fire a bus attendant accused of choking an autistic student, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reports.

Privatization gone wrong. At the Department of Education, within the Division of Blind Services, editorializes the Tampa Bay Times. The paper uses the issues there to take a dig at charter schools: “Ever since then-Gov. Jeb Bush took office in 1999, state government has been moving more toward hiring private vendors to do state business — from handling state park reservations to opening private prisons. And Gov. Rick Scott, a former health care executive, has only accelerated that push, for instance by making it easier for charter school companies to qualify for money that used to be dedicated to public schools.”

AP Honor Roll: Eleven Florida districts are among 539 nationwide on the College Board’s latest annual Honor Roll, awarded to districts that increase access to AP classes at the same time they maintain or improve AP test pass rates. Among the 11: Pinellas, which was the subject yesterday of an oddly critical story. (Hat tip, Orlando Sentinel School Zone blog)

Tony Bennett watch. Comments from acting Florida ed commissioner Pam Stewart.

Charter watch. From the Sentinel ed blog late last night: “The Orange County School Board approved one charter school application, rejected two others, and agreed on a contract with a school that the state forced the school district to accept.”

School choice will have its own legislative committee. From the News Service of Florida (subscription required): “Incoming House Speaker Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, is revamping the House's committee structure, including making changes that will affect education and regulatory issues. The changes, outlined in a memo sent to House members Wednesday, include creating an education Choice & Innovation Subcommittee, which will deal with a wide range of issues such as charter schools, virtual instruction and voucher-type programs.”

A plea on teacher evals. The Florida Education Association asks Gov. Rick Scott to use his authority to postpone the linking of standardized test scores to teacher evaluations, the Orlando Sentinel reports.

More school funding votes. Voters in Seminole said yes to a tax hike, voters in Volusia said no, the Orlando Sentinel reports. Brevard voters also said no, Florida Today reports.

Charter school closing. The Lee County School Board prepares to close a charter school with financial problems, the Fort Myers News Press reports.

About that $155 million verdict for the former charter principal. Nevermind, the Miami Herald reports.

Mounting criticism over student deaths. Hillsborough County parents start facebook pages and have scheduled a protest in response to the deaths of two special needs students, the Tampa Bay Times reports.

From Idaho and Indiana, a message for Jeb Bush? StateImpact Florida.