>> Third graders with poor reading skills will be among those most at risk of becoming high school dropouts. The risk rises significantly if they are black or Hispanics and come from low-income families. Even a year of poverty increases the likelihood that children will not finish high school on time (or at all) if they fall behind in reading in the third grade. -- Annie E. Casey Foundation: Double jeopardy -- how third-grade reading skills and poverty influence high school graduation. (Donald J. Hernandez) April 2011 >> Florida’s value-added teacher evaluation will punish innovation because the method is not applicable to classrooms where teachers work as teams or that involve the use of online or edtv technology. The method prescribed in SB 736 makes “a whole lot of sense in a 1940s school, but not much in a state that wants to be known as a mecca for education reform,” warns Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute and blogger for Education Week. It will be a mistake if the state adopts such a rigid, old-fashioned system, Hess cautions. The known unreliability of most tests, especially the FCAT, will render the teacher evaluations inconsistent over time, introducing a strong element of randomness in the effort to reward good teachers and weed out the poor ones. As class sizes increase, as the result of budget cuts, the measurable differences among teachers’ classroom performance will begin to shrink. -- Florida Tribune: Does teacher meit pay bill rely on flawed model? (Kim MacQueen), 31March2011 >> Disillusionment with the value of a college education will damage the reputation of Florida’s mid-ranked colleges and universities as their graduates struggle to find any jobs, let alone those that are commensurate with their degrees. Encouraging young people to major in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) will not help to improve the reputation of the less prestigious colleges and universities as there may already be an overproduction of STEM professionals. (Only graduates of elite universities will find that the investment pays off professionally and financially.) Occupational surveys suggest that there is considerable demand for middle-level skilled workers, but most of these jobs require a two-year rather than four-year college education. The crisis in credentialism is further aggravated by the proliferation of for-profit colleges that may provide nearly worthless diplomas at very high cost. -- Inside Higher Education: The global auction (Scott Jaschik), 21Dec2010 >> Students from low-income families will often benefit from attending those charter schools that have a record of success teaching youth from disadvantaged backgrounds. They will have a better chance of graduating from charter high schools and going on to college. Higher income charter students, however, tend to perform notably worse than their counterparts in regular public schools and the overall dismal test scores of charter students in Florida (and five other states) lowered the national average, in an evaluation by Stanford University. -- Miller-McCune Magazine: A’s and F’s for charter schools (Melinda Burns), 23October2010. >> Florida’s proposed “Race to the Top” strategy will divert money from the public school classroom to more testing and “accountability” efforts – continuing a long-running education policy that has so-far kept Florida nearer the bottom than the top in national statistics. Mandating a tougher curriculum without providing better teaching support will make it harder to graduate from high school, and boost the already-appalling dropout rates among minorities. - Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy: Florida’s latest strategy for improving schools promises more of the same – and uncertain results. ((Alan Stonecipher), July 2010 >> Many education reform proposals will turn out to be faddish trends that are too radical to work in practice. Long-time advocate of choice and accountability, Harvard's Diane Ravitch, now believes that the No Child measures have been a failure in raising student achievement, leading instead to the dumbing down of schools testing becomes an end in itself. Neither does the average charter school outperform the average public school. In fact, bad charter schools outnumber good ones by a margin of 2 to 1. Too often charter schools drain scarce resources from the public schools and can be socially divisive. Ravitch foresees a danger to democracy if public education is less able to continue its historic role in promoting social mobility. -- New York Times: Scholar's school reform U-turn shakes up debate. (Sam Dillon), 02Mar10. >> Evaluating teachers on the basis of student test performance will make it even more difficult to attract the best talent to the profession. FCAT and most other state tests are unreliable measures of academic proficiency (compared to the NAEP) and will tend to classify too many good teachers as failures and too many failed teachers as successful, with little consistency from year to year. Consequently, personnel decisions will be highly arbitrary, producing low morale and high turnover. – Orlando Sentinel: Florida has tougher standards than other states but not so tough as NAEP yardstick. 29Oct09; Slate: Facing up to our ignorance – We don’t yet know how to save schools. (Sara Mosel) 11Mar10; Miami Herald: Florida would be the first in U.S. to closely tie teachers’ pay to student performance rather than years of experience. (Shannon Colavecchio and Hannah Sampson), 15Mar10 >> Links between merit pay for teachers and achievement gains among their students will be hard to demonstrate. Studies to establish a correlation have been inconclusive, because success depends on enabling conditions that are difficult to implement in a given school environment. These conditions include improved methods for teacher evaluation and development, improved data systems for students and teachers, adequate long-term funding, supportive state and federal policies, and active involvement by all the stakeholders. – The Progress of Education Reform: Teacher merit pay – what do we know? June 2010; Florida Policy Matters: Successful implementation of merit pay will require time, money, and involvement from teachers themselves. 03August2010 > Putting more money into education will create more high-paying jobs than will tax breaks and subsidies for businesses. The benefits of investing more in K through 12 will have a cumulative payoff as children are better prepared for the critical high school years – when a high drop-out rate will have crippling effects on the economy. With more students graduating from high school, more will enroll in college. Generous funding of post-secondary education allows expansion to keep up with a growing college population and keeps tuition affordable for many middle and low income families. College graduates will tend to earn more than those with only a high school diploma and are less likely to be jobless and to need welfare assistance. A well-funded university system will also attract academic stars to the faculty who will be successful in winning research grants and contracts. Active research programs will produce patents (that, in turn, produce revenue for the universities) and seed startup high tech companies that will create good paying jobs. In contrast, cutbacks in education will derail this step-wise sequence in which one success builds on another. Children will not get the push they need in the critical early years, high schoolers will continue to drop out at an alarming rate – creating an uneducated underclass of the permanently unemployable, college will be financially out-of-reach for many families, and universities will be less able to attract and retain academic talent. Paradoxically, many businesses that received tax breaks to create jobs will have difficulty finding well-educated workers without recruiting from other states with superior education systems. -- Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy: Florida’s state university system – an investment that creates jobs. (Alex Krivosheyev and Michael Walsh) May 2010 >> Florida will need to produce 4.5 million more college graduates by 2030 to match the 33 percent of workers in the 10 most prosperous states that have bachelor's degrees. Right now, only about 27 percent of Florida residents between ages 25 and 34 are college graduates. Fifteen countries, including Japan, Korea, France and Canada, also surpass Florida on this measure. Part of the problem is the ten percent difference in college drop out rates, with Florida seeing an attrition rate of more than 30 percent between the freshman and sophomore years. The state also ranks very low in affordability, despite its cheap tuition.-- Enlace Florida Policy Research Brief: Florida will continue to lag behind other states in educational attainment rates without expansion of post-secondary public education.February 2010 >> The quality of Florida’s workforce will lag competing states because of the lower percentage of college graduates. About 35 percent of the state’s students who graduated in 2009 had no college plans. The national average is about 30 percent. With six out of 10 jobs requiring at least some college education,Florida’s high school grads will face diminishing job opportunities and substantially lower lifetime pay. -- SunSentinel.com: More than a third of Florida high school grads skip college (Scott Travis), 05July2010 >> Disruptive technologies will shake up the leadership among the world’s great research universities, and the University of Central Florida will be among the top ranks. UCF continues to be a prodigious producer of patents, in 2009 moving up to third place nationally, outpaced only by the University of Texas and the University of California, according to the IEEE annual ranking. Since 2007, Harvard, MIT, Cal Tech and Rice have lost ground, dropping out of the top ten, while two foreign universities – Oxford and South Korea’s Pohang University of Science and Technology – have emerged as major contenders – IEEE Spectrum: Patent Power Scorecard – Japan ascendant(Patrick Thomas and Anthony Breitzman), March 2010. |
Education Trends and Issues |
