Posts filed under 'Education'
Apparently the Florida House passed a bill this session as a response to a consent decree the ACLU got Santa Rosa County school system to sign prohibiting prayer and religious activities by students and staff at school events. FloridaThinks has a fascinating story today on the potential unintended consequences of the bill:
Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Association in Washington, D.C., says the legislation may unshackle student newspapers from the usual oversight of school administrators, effectively putting Florida among seven states – none in the Southeast – that have passed laws endorsing free expression for students. Student papers running frank discussions of sex on campus, drug-use, and other provocative topics usually face few restrictions in the states that have approved such laws, LoMonte says.
Read the whole article HERE.
June 3rd, 2010
Florida Thinks: Crist’s Veto May Only Delay the Inevitable
Florida Thinks Editor & Publisher John Koenig weighs in sensibly today on the future of efforts to tie teacher pay and retention to student performance. According to Koenig, teachers have little choice but to advance a plan on their own terms or the legislature will do it for them:
Gov. Charlie Crist’s veto of the teacher-compensation bill does not end the push to link teacher pay and job security to student performance. It only buys teachers a bit of time to come up with their own accountability proposals.
More wisdom from Koenig:
Merit pay might seem to make common sense. But numerous studies of its effectiveness in improving performance in public sector jobs have produced only mixed findings…even for the private sector, performance-incentive programs are tricky. Basing them on too few variables or the wrong variables can lead to counterproductive results.
Consider this story from Fast Company magazine. Ken O’Brien was an NFL quarterback in the 1980s and ‘90s who threw a lot of interceptions. In an attempt to improve his performance, the owners of the team on which he played put a clause into his contract docking his paycheck for each interception. The next year, O’Brien threw fewer inceptions. But that was because he threw the ball hardly at all. The net effect: The team did no better.
Good advice teachers might want to consider now rather than later.
Florida Thinks is a must-read online resource to get Florida, well… thinking. Village Square members enjoy a special discount subscription rate of $3.99 monthly from the normal $4.99/mo rate. Learn more here.
April 16th, 2010
“… by virtually every empirical evaluation by Democrats and Republicans alike, we are spending on a recurring basis 2 to 4 billion annually on class size that has little or no impact on student achievement. Now I actually think that class size for district averages probably makes some sense and we ought to lock it in there but not each school site and certainly not each individual classroom itself. It’s so inflexible as to be not only impractical but counterproductive in educating each and every child.”
–Dominic Calabro, President and CEO FloridaTaxWatch
March 2nd, 2009
“I think we need to bring education funding back up. If we’re going to be competitive economically, we have to have a world class education system. We had a very conservative governor who thought education was important and thought that a 72 billion dollar education budget was necessary for this state. Now we’ve cut down to the low 60’s. We’ve cut too low and we must bring it back.” –State Senator Thad Altman (R- Melbourne)
On seeking a higher education: “Because if you think in your own families, your own lives, who was the first person in your family, the very first, who decided they would seek higher education? Maybe it was you, maybe it will be your children, maybe it was your father or your grandfather or mother or grandmother. But the moment that Rubicon was crossed, the moment that someone in your family decided they were going to advance themselves to a different level, your entire family changed, forever. And guess what? So did your community, when it happens in multiples and so did your city.and so did your county and your state and your nation.” –State Senator Dan Gelber (D- Miami Beach)
February 27th, 2009
