Northwest Florida Daily News columnist, Wendy Victora, effectively argues that the delay in schools getting FCAT results “prove how little we need it.”

“Get rid of this standardized monster, which casts a pall over schools, teachers and students from the beginning of the school year until the end.

And it could be financially wise, too. The state would save the big bucks it costs to create the tests, grade them and have the results analyzed, printed and mailed.”

Obviuosly Victora’s not alone and she explains how she came to the conclusion:

They measure how much students have learned, and are learning, in countless ways, completely unrelated to the FCAT beast.

Problems with the delay already have hit our school. Our adminstrators have had to throw out next year’s schedule which is always done during these last two months of school.

Victora’s point that teachers already know about students progess is justified in the fact that teachers have measurements of how students performed in the classroom over the past nine and a half months. We also have semester and end-of-course finals. Yet FCAT potentially can negate all of these.

Victora wants to know who really likes FCAT anyway.

Who really likes FCAT? Raise your hand. If I could see that far, I expect I’d see some bureaucratic types in Tallahassee with their hands held high.

When I think of things this world really needs, more standardized testing isn’t even at the bottom of the list. Nor are the layers of bureaucracy that the government can use, in one way or another, to continue to under fund our children’s schools.

Here’s where I can help Victora a bit.

Jeb Bush likes FCAT.

The former govenor is the driving force behind efforts to strengthen FCAT and make it an even more powerful tool in assessing students, teachers and schools. FCAT is a large part of the calculus of SB6 which was rejected by an unprecedented number of people from a wide variety of groups.

Bush and his GOP allies in the Florida legislature have vowed to moved forward with the same bill in the event Bill McCollum wins. Aside from a few brave naysayers like Sen. Paula Dockery (R-Lakeland) the state’s GOP leadership intends to move forward with their education reform efforts which largely depend on using such standardized tests as FCAT.

Posted under EDUCATION

Called extremist by Democrats and and old idea who’s time as come by Republicans, Nevada Senatorial GOP candidate Sharron Angle thinks we should do just that. Syndicated columnists Mona Charen pens a piece that details reason’s why abolishment of the DOE is a good idea:

The Department of Education was created as a straight political payoff to the teachers’ unions by Pres. Jimmy Carter (in return for their 1976 endorsement). According to the National Center for Education Statistics, DE’s original budget, in 1980, was $13.1 billion (in 2007 dollars), and it employed 450 people. By 2000, it had increased to $34.1 billion, and by 2007 it had more than doubled to $73 billion. The budget request for fiscal 2011 is $77.8 billion, and the department employs 4,800.

All of this spending has done nothing to improve American education. Between 1973 and 2004, a period in which federal spending on education more than quadrupled, mathematics scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress rose just 1 percent for American 17-year-olds. Between 1971 and 2004, reading scores remained completely flat.

Those hard numbers clearly demonstrate there is no justification for the existance of the DOE. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t even indicate hidden costs that state’s and local school districts incur due to federal mandates.

It’s no secret that it costs money to run schools, but the existance of the DOE has served only to ensure that more money be spent outside of the building where kids are actually being taught.

Posted under EDUCATION

One of the nation’s most respected writers on education, Diane Ravitch, has this morning’s must read. No fan of Obama’s Race to the Top, she hacks through some data that Steve Brill is using to advocate charter schools:

Brill wrongly asserts that a charter school in Harlem in New York City achieves success with precisely the same children who attend a regular public school in the same building. If Brill knew anything about education, he would have sought data from the New York state Education Department. If he had, he would have discovered that the charter school and the regular public school do not serve the same kinds of students.
Brill wrongly asserts that a charter school in Harlem in New York City achieves success with precisely the same children who attend a regular public school in the same building. If Brill knew anything about education, he would have sought data from the New York state Education Department. If he had, he would have discovered that the charter school and the regular public school do not serve the same kinds of students

It’s called cherry-picked data.

Within my own school, we are aware of differences between students. My freshmen Biology I classes do not perform as well as do the freshmen Honors Biology classes on standardized tests. To justify usage of Brill’s Charter School, one would have to overturn mainstreaming laws for special ed kids. We’d have to do away with IEPs – which are specific accomodations and individual interventions that teachers are required by law to apply in the classroom. What Brill would have us do with these students to make his optimal school a reality he likley has not considered.

Not to worry. Those students weren’t in the Bronx school.

Ravitch usually discourages merit pay plans and does so here:

“…. unaware that competitive pay plans have a record of consistent failure and that even when they “succeed,” such plans incentivize the wrong behaviors among teachers, who are compelled to do more counterproductive teaching-to-the-test and more curriculum-narrowing. Such behaviors do not produce good education.”

The Florida GOP Seantors whom rammed through SB6 after some show hearings wouldn’t have been interested in anything that Ravitch says. Naysayers were dismissed out of hand and no ammendments were added. But you can be assured that, like Jeb Bush, they’ll cite the kind of cherry-picked data that the Steve Brill’s of the world like.

Posted under EDUCATION

A colleague recently provided a quote from Florida State Sen. Don Gaetz he made in the aftermath of Charlie Crist’s veto of SB6:

“Sen. Don Gaetz, a Republican from Niceville and a former head of Okaloosa County schools, also vowed that the legislation will be back next year.

“I think recognizing and rewarding Florida’s outstanding teachers is a moral imperative,” he said. “This is an issue that won’t go away.”

“It won’t be Gov. Crist who signs this bill next year, it will be Gov. McCollum,” Gaetz said.”

Gaetz knows that the bill has little, if anything, to do with “recognizing and rewarding outstanding teachers”.

Funding for Florida’s public schools continues to decrease in percentage. To fit increased teacher pay into such realities one must first cast aside a simple principle of running a business. Business owners know only a certain percentage can go toward salaries. There’s not a teacher is the state of Florida who doesn’t know that the money available to run the building they work in is tight. To somehow imply that a yet to be determined group of teachers would somehow be paid more cannot be fit into any business model.

Yet this is just one way how Gaetz and the GOP state’s legislators whom advanced SB6 are spinning the issue. Here’s another whopper from Senate President Jeff Atwater:

Senate president Jeff Atwater, a candidate for CFO, said “I am disappointed that today Governor Crist chose to reverse direction and veto SB 6.”

“SB 6 was the culmination of months of study, public participation, and debate,” Atwater said. “At each step of the legislative process, testimony was received and amendments were offered and adopted. The Florida Senate worked closely with Governor Crist’s Education Commissioner Eric Smith and maintained an open door to all interested parties

Atwaters’s assertion that “testimony was received and amendments were offered and adopted” is misleading at best.

SB 6 meets our definition of jamming a bill through, which is good for Crist. What’s bad for him, however, is that the debate over the federal health care bill was actually more collegial. We have to rate Crist’s statement Half True.

How can state GOP leaders be trusted on education with such public dishonesty and legislative heavy-handedness?

Gaetz himself has lost the credibility he once had with the teachers who once worked for him. Some, like me, were strong supporters.

When Gaetz went to the legislature he maintained his Okaloosa School District’s email list. He frequently kept us updated with legislation that that were of interests to constituents, but not one time did we receive anything of SB6, a bill he co-sponsored.

So it is such assertions as Gaetz’, “It won’t be Gov. Crist who signs this bill next year, it will be Gov. McCollum,” which gives many teachers like me such pause. Such pause in fact that I am considering something I said that I would never, ever, do again. A vote for Democrat Alex Sink might be a necessary counterweight to my own party that’s run amok with poor judgement, dishonesty and wrecklessness.

Posted under EDUCATION, FLORIDA POLITICS

I’m putting by conservative bonifides on the line again by touting an LA Times op-ed, but this is a good one.

The “unschooling” movement of the 1970s featured open classrooms, in which children studied what they were most interested in, when they felt ready. That was followed by today’s back-to-basics, early-start model, in which students complete math worksheets in kindergarten and are supposed to take algebra by eighth grade at the latest. Under the “whole language” philosophy of the 1980s, children were expected to learn to read by having books read to them. By the late 1990s, reading lessons were dominated by phonics, with little time spent on the joys of what reading is all about — unlocking the world of stories and information.

No wonder schools have a chronic case of educational whiplash. If there’s a single aspect of schooling that ought to end, it’s the decades of abrupt and destructive swings from one extreme to another. There is no magic in the magic-bullet approach to learning. Charters are neither evil nor saviors; they can be a useful complement to public schools, but they have not blazed a sure-fire path to student achievement. Decreeing that all students will be proficient in math and reading by 2014 hasn’t moved us dramatically closer to the mark

The LA Times has something for everyone in their piece and hasn’t reflexibly just taken the side of national teacher’s unions. They advocate for some level of teacher assessments while effectively pointing out the flaws of standardized testing.

This sort of middle ground is the place the Republican Party needs to be taking on education. Instead it continues to buy into Draconian takeovers like SB6 that betray conservative principles while demonizing naysayers.

Posted under EDUCATION, FLORIDA POLITICS

The former govenor is not alone in his own party. Partisan Republican group think seeks to impose their all-knowing take on education based on cherry-picked data from his own foundation and feel good platitudes.

Govenor Bush continues to grip tightly to the notion that the FCAT – a one day assessment that was intended to measure acheivement levels is an end all in measuring learning “gains”. Utilization of the FCAT remains his primary justification for the advancement of his party’s agenda. This would be just a simple-minded embarrassment for a public servant of magnitude if it weren’t so demonstrably wrong. Yet the fervor that his agenda is advanced by an entire political party creates a never ending train wreck for the education of America’s children.

It is the FCAT that Jeb Bush continues to insist we accept as the end all to make all of our decisions regarding education. Pay no attention to evidence that FCAT is proving harmful or ineffective. Lets catalog a few.

1. Students have failed FCAT time and time again, even while they, their schools, teachers and families know they need it to graduate. Some 3000 south Florida HS seniors may fail to graduate as they did not score hig enough on FCAT retakes. Bush would have you believe that this simply means that blame needs to be placed on these student’s teachers.

2. Only 16% of Florida’s 22,000 seniors who retook FCAT reading passed. Only 28% of 8600 seniors whom retook FCAT Math passed. This is a bitter pill for these students knowing that this was at least the third time they took the test. Never mind the fact that both No Child Left Behind (Bush)and Race to the Top (Obama) see 100% graduation as the goal and that such a standardized test as the solution. But it’s the teachers fault you see.

3. Many don’t realize that a significant number of these same students will substitute a passing grade on the ACT or SAT – both college entrance exams – for the FCAT to graduate. Some 130 HS Seniors from the Treasure Coast graduated in 2008 because of accpetable scores on the ACT or SAT. They’re passing a college entrance test, but not the FCAT? This fact alone begs for further assessment of using FCAT as any kind of assessment tool.

4. FCAT Reading scores in Florida have been on decline. One look at the numbers of the counties with the highest percentages of students accepted by colleges – Santa Rosa, Sarasota, Martin and St. Johns showed passing rates of 10th grade reading of 47%, 43%, 50% and 53%. Only half of 10th graders? Bush would have us assume somehow that these rates indicate teachers are somehow at fault and that some should even be fired. Bush furthermore would have us believe that somehow the FCAT is working.

The first two in the above lists use stories released over the past few days and Bush’s op-ed piece looks desperate in it’s attempt to put FCAT in a glowing light. Bush’s study used teachers who’s students made the highest gains on FCAT. The observations they make about effective teachers are one’s that any teacher, parent or student could come up with. Yet Bush’s use of FCAT indicates that he would have us believe that only teachers who’s kids have done well on the FCAT can actualize such lofty ideals.

Still despite mounting evidence to the contrary, Bush maintains that FCAT scores are up and that the measures he advanced during his govenorship and his championing of SB6 are right for education.

Perhaps it is the fact of the matter that it is not only educators whom realize the folly in the use of standardized tests in general and the FCAT in particular. The lesson of SB6 should serve as a teachable moment for Jeb Bush and his acolytes in the Florida legislature.
Opposition to the bill could not have been more broad. The cynical among the Republican Party unfortunately still choose to see Charlie Crist’s SB6 veto and gubernatorial candidate Paula Dockery’s opposition as pandering to the teacher’s union when the public at large are now distrustful of unions.

This continued spin and delusion on the part of the Republican Party and pols like Jeb Bush on education only serves to harm the conseravtive movement. The administration of SB6 could have not been more contary to conservative principles. The manner in which it was advanced through both Florida legislative houses was earily similar to the way Obamacare was shoved through in Washington.

So perhaps it is the naysayers amongst Republicans like Dockery that thoughtful conservatives in the state should be paying more attention to. The fact that Charlie Crist leads a three-way race in some polling data indicates that some conservatives were turned off by the hysterical hostility heaped upon him by many GOP Florida legislative leaders. Republicans cannot be alienating conservatives, but their shrill rhetoric and flawed justifications and methods regarding education issues are doing just that.

Posted under EDUCATION, FLORIDA POLITICS

From the ever useful Buzz.

As the story indicates, the FEA is pressuring the AFL-CIO to do the same.

Well maybe “pressuring” is too strong a word. I can’t see the AFL-CIO not going with a Democrat, but the FEA couldn’t betray the large number of independents among their membership who were heartened by Crist’s veto of SB6.

Count me among those members. Count me again as a Republican who’s furious with his party’s continued naivite on education. I understand why so many colleagues on conservative values become one issue voters.

It is here where the GOP needs to change and stop seeing education as blood sport with unions. My party’s terribly misguided desire to measure students outcomes with multiple choice tests and apply it to teacher salaries betrays reasoned judgement.

The senate vote is a tough one for conservative teachers who were once supporting Marco Rubio as I did. But Rubio’s reflexive endorsement of SB6 along with the continued heavy handedness of Florida’s GOP leaders on the bill gave many of us pause.

That pause is still there.

Charlie Crist’s willingness to make hard choices that would enrage hyper partisan republicans I find terribly appealing. Rubio was too quick to react negatively to the Arizona immigration bill, before he backpeddled. But Crist is going to start showing me that he’s not just pandering to liberal Democrats right now for me to give him my vote in November.

Posted under EDUCATION, FLORIDA POLITICS

I think it is, but apparently Michael Barone doesn’t. His recent post in the Washington Examiner points to this assertion.

It didn’t get much attention, but this week The White House announced its support for a bailout of one of the President’s most important constituent groups: public school teachers (teachers unions, basically).

It could turn out that I am wrong, but I believe that these assets are targeting states and school districts that are having to lay off teachers because of budget cuts. The Obama administration does not frame the issue well when they say it’s about saving teachers jobs. It should be about not losing teachers in the classroom.

The funding that Charlie Crist accepted in stimulus money helped keep my school from losing 14 teachers because of budget cuts. Two of these jobs were from my Science Department. Their loss would have easily increased my class sizes to 35 and added another period. This year I have had between 115 and 125 students on my rolls. It would have been likley increased to 200 if we had not gotten the stimulus money.

I’m on board with the idea that all of this nonsense was created with the formation of the US Department of Education. Teachers, like firemen and police officers are public servants employed locally. Far too many mandates from the federal level are intrusive to the relationship between public servants and the people whom employ them.

Government control at the federal level of local employees has never been a good idea. Even state mandates often pose difficulties for local school districts with bureaucratic burden. Florida’s Association of School Superintendants, many of them Republicans, balked at Florida’s SB6 not because of tenure or merit pay. The bill seized what was once local school board control and put it at the state level. The bill’s GOP advocates fueled partisan yearnings with push polls and public demonization of teacher unions, but the bill was a total departure from conservative principles of government of fiscal responsibility.

Federal mandates while well intended are more far reaching and have served to make process harder and increased administrative costs. See the folly of Goals 2000 ( Clinton) No Child Left Behind (Bush) and Race to the Top (Obama) as further evidence of how ineffective and counterproductive federal medling has been for education.

The DOE’s formation from the beginning was transparently political as then President Jimmy Carter and the Democrats sought to strengthen another union that would in return both finance them and deliver a voting block. Nothing of real quality for America’s children has really happened since it’s 1970′s inseption. It’s fair to say that much of the national decline in public education can be timelined with an emerging nationalization of public eduaction.

Small wonder even shrewed political observers like Barone, may misread an earmark meant to keep teachers in the classroom as a sordid union payoff.

Posted under EDUCATION

One of my favorite bloggers, Betsy Newmark, has an excellent piece today that focuses on reason why some charter schools work. Part of her support involved dealing “guided discovery” – a favorite of administrators who have all the answers- a useful smackdown:

“How much of this approach is practically anathema to many public school teachers? I’ve sat through so many education workshops where the leader and other participants pooh pooh such ideas. The emphasis is strongly on discovery learning. They want to engage all sorts of learning styles and get away from the drill and learn approach. They don’t believe in lots of testing or holding teacher and students accountable to standards and testing.

And for some students that is just fine. If you’re teaching students who come in with a strong foundation in reading and math, you have the time to devote to discovery experiences. But such lessons take more time and can be more hit and miss, especially if the class discipline is not strong. With students coming in to a fifth grade classroom who are already below grade level in reading and math, there isn’t the time for constructivist learning experiences. They need to master the basics quickly so that they’re ready to move on.”

While I differ with Newmark slightly regarding public schools – I believe one’s that work like mine should be modeled and don’t believe there’s as much wide spread union bullying tactics as Republicans like to believe- her link about the way an effective charter school works is a lesson that should be shared.

Posted under EDUCATION

For those of us who work in public schools in Florida, The Gradebook has been an invaluable tool in following events. It’s primary reporter, Jeff Solochek should be considered for several awards when they come up. Solochek provides this link to an op-ed by the NYTimes’ Gail Collins regarding the our states upcoming senatorial election. Here’s some of Collin’s piece:

“It’s a terrible time for American teachers — almost every school district is facing monster budget cuts, and a number of politicians have tried to make them the villain in the story. (New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, recently accused them of using their students as “drug mules” to convey information on school budget votes.) If Crist defeats Rubio with the teachers’ support, it will certainly help them push back.

Meanwhile, all this anxiety cannot possibly be good for classroom performance. Keep an eye on Florida. And give the next teacher you see a smile, or an apple.”

Collins entire column is worth reading. She’s an extremely talented writer and describes the current electoral climate very well.

My own recent move to clarify on my Facebook page (a new undertaking in and of itself) as a conservative republican with sanity has left me uncertain as to whom I will be supporting in the upcoming election for the Senate seat.

Only a few weeks ago, I had both feet on the Rubio train. His immediate buy-in to SB6 gave me pause. It’s too partisan by half and demonstrated to me that Rubio is too closely alligned with the wishes of former govenor Jeb Bush. His condemnation earlier this week of the Arizona illegal alien bill that was seconded within hours by Bush is further evidence that the two are joined at the hip.

Rubio lost some his conseravtive street cred with this gambit. And the public strengthening of his ties to Bush will not serve him well with some of his supporters. All of this may play in to the reason a recent pole has Charlie Crist ahead in a three-way race with Rubio and Kendrick Meek.

Rubio’s criticism of the Arizone bill left me with the feeling that he’s not as a reliable vote against Barack Obama’s chilling agenda. But he’s probably more reliable that Crist. Still Crist will probably will be a better custodian of Florida’s best interest whereas Rubio more so one for the GOP establishment.

A personal connumdrum continues for many voters like me.

Posted under EDUCATION, POLITICS