A1A South

Florida’s innovative approach to teachers and elaborate testing system were applauded in an annual magazine ranking, although the level of per-student funding was again criticized.

Florida compared well with other states in public-education effectiveness, according to an annual report card issued by Education Week on Wednesday, but the study says the state still struggles in many key areas.

The state this year came in 14th overall on Education Week’s Quality Counts report, earning a C-plus grade. Florida ranked 31st last year, but the rankings can’t be compared because the magazine changed how they are calculated.

No state this year earned an A. New York, Massachusetts and Maryland topped the list with B’s.

Florida scored poorly for how much it spends on education and for how students perform, earning C’s. Per-student spending in Florida, which was $7,539 in 2005, ranks 39th nationwide, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics.

Florida earned its worst grade, a C-minus, in education spending. But state Education Commissioner Eric Smith expressed pride in how well Florida’s teachers and students performed despite the tight budget.

”Given the financial resources and the complexities of the state of Florida, we are certainly on the right track,” Smith said. “A grade of C-plus is not what I would want my kids to bring home from school. While the highest grade is only a B, we’d like to be the first A.”

The state’s high rank in student achievement — seventh — was largely because the average national grade was a dismal D-plus. Florida’s grade was C.

The report did little to quiet critics of the state’s education policies. ”Florida has had one of the worst graduation rates in the country for years,” said House Democratic Leader Dan Gelber of Miami Beach. “Our teachers are paid woefully below the national average and our overall financing for public schools is pitiful.”

The state earned a healthy A-minus for how it measures student achievement: its testing system, based on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, helped boost the overall score.

Gelber acknowledged the state’s high score in assessment standards, but said the report failed to “examine the impact these standards have had on Florida’s curriculum or, ultimately, achievement.”

Florida also earned good grades for its controversial experiment tying a portion of teacher pay to performance, which earned a B — fourth nationally — in the report.

”High-quality teaching matters more than anything else than schools do,” said Lynn Olson, the executive project editor of Quality Counts.

“Most school systems pay teachers based on seniority and their degrees and teachers earn tenure quickly. There’s been a number of reports in the past couple of years that call these teaching approaches into question.”

Source:  Miami Herald.com

FCAT time is nearing, and the teachers are teaching to the limits of their abilities to enable the kids to pass the FCAT. The teachers are accountable. If their students don’t pass the FCAT, they can lose pay and/or their jobs, particularly if they are beginning teachers without a continuing contract. The administration is accountable. If enough students fail to pass from their schools, the administrators can lose their jobs. The kids are accountable in that if they do not pass the FCAT, they will fail that grade, (which they may or may not care about). So, if everybody’s accountable, why are we still having kids fail?

While I’m not THAT old, the makeup of the American family has changed dramatically since I was in high school. At that time, living with both parents was the norm where I grew up and having divorced parents was relatively rare. Now, a two-parent household on their first marriage is a rarety in many schools.

We have a large number of kids that are being raised by nobody. Parent(s) who have failed to grow up and take responsibility for their lives and their children are in and out of jail on drug and alcohol charges. The child(ren) are taken care of by other family members, perhaps a grandparent if they are lucky, or survive by moving into a succession of friends’ houses. This happens more frequently than most people know. We had no idea about the size of the problem until our kids were in high school and brought kids home that didn’t have a place to stay. I saw an old Andy Griffith rerun recently about Opie bringing home a stray dog and asking plaintively if he could keep him. When that television show was made, who then would have imagined that children 40 years into the future would be bringing home unwanted children that don’t have a place to stay? I know of several families that have raised their children as well as a child’s friend that didn’t have a place to go, and maybe a niece or nephew as well.

“Well”, you are probably saying, “that’s all very heartrending, but what does all this have to do with education?”

Some children of this generation are facing a multitude of problems stemming from the breakup of family life. The school can only be a very limited surrogate parent and really shouldn’t be in the parenting business at all. Schools now serve breakfast as well as lunch so that the child will at least receive two meals a day. This was done because so many parents were not feeding their children breakfast, and the child was too hungry to be able to concentrate on studies in the morning. However, if a child is also worried about where he/she is going to be able to spend the night because mom has taken up with a new boyfriend or dad’s new girlfriend said they’d have to go, how can they possibly concentrate on schoolwork? This is a problem that the schools cannot fix.

Another problem the schools face in trying to educate the students are those children who do have caring parents; however, the parents fail to step up and act like parents. If the child is not performing at school; i.e., refuses to do his/her schoolwork, cuts classes, and fails tests because of lack of effort/studying, these parents will call up the school and scream at the teacher and/or principal because they are being “mean” to their child by asking them to do their schoolwork, come to class, and giving them a failing grade that they earned. There are always long lines of children getting admit slips to class because their parents couldn’t get them to school by 8:00 a.m. It is long past time for parents to be held responsible, too.

There are other problems, of course. Test anxiety is a big one. Some children get so nervous that they freeze during the test because even if they perform well throughout the school year, if they blow the test, the whole year’s worth of work might be down the drain. There are children who may be very creative or talented mechanically, artistically, or musically, but struggle with reading comprehension. For these children, the teachers will help them prepare to the very best of their (and the child’s) ability. Unfortunately, sometimes that is not enough.

Florida does have a fairly high drop out rate as the article points out. Whether the child has actually dropped out of school or has moved to another state (or country) and will finish their education there, we do not know. We also have a lot of immigrants (both legal and illegal). We have some students from a background in which education is not valued, and the students are marking time until they are old enough to legally drop out. Testing and accountability of the schools is not going to be a panacea for cultural problems.

Are the tests perfect? No, of course not. They are continually monitored and suggestions for modifications are made. Florida’s education was in a far worse state before the FCAT was implemented and while not perfect, it is still the best tool we have available to assess learning. And we continually strive to improve (and do improve) at one of the lowest costs per student in the U.S.