District Administration - October 2011 - (Page 86)

Changing of the Guard in Florida lor is that I would hope he would support public schools. We do the work of accepting all students. I would hope he would work closely with superintendents and talk with them, and I believe he will.” Montford, who voted against the scholarship programs while wearing his state Senate hat, says FADSS is concerned about money being diverted to schools that are not held to the same level of accountability. “That certainly reduces those funds that are available for public education,” he says of the corporate tax breaks. “What we have to ensure is that if any tax dollars, including corporate scholarship dollars, are received by a school or program, they need to be held to the same standards, the same level of accountability, the same level of transparency. We should not have two sets of rules. … We owe it to the children, and we owe it to the taxpayers, to make sure those tax dollars are being used wisely.” Daniel Boyd, superintendent in Alachua County, says he’s “vehemently opposed” to taxpayer money going to private schools, and he “will listen respectfully” to proposals to develop charters, provided the commissioner cites research showing they’re doing a better job. “But I’m not conceding to any agency as far as offering high-quality programs,” he says. “Public schools do not select and sort their programs. You can take a charter school that picks and chooses the students they educate, you can take a private entity that picks and chooses the students they educate, and they can look really good.” Charters haven’t necessarily been the right fix, according to an editorial in the Palm Beach Post that ran on Aug. 9, Robinson’s second day on the job. Headlined “Charters don’t match hype,” the piece noted that, while 5 percent of the state’s 2.6 million public school students attend charter schools, those schools comprise 15 of the 31 schools that received an “F” on the Florida FCAT test during the 20102011 school year. Yet the newspaper pointed out that charters had received every penny of the $55 million the state 86 October 2011 legislature allocated for 2011-2012 to build and repair schools. “Regular public schools got zilch,” the Post said. Smith says she’s open to charter schools so long as their education is of equal or greater quality and they provide something unique and different. “That’s not often the case,” she says. “We do have a large number of our charter schools that are not successful. … They need to be held to the same transparency and the same accountability as [traditional] public schools.” Merit Pay Another hot potato on Robinson’s plate will be the early implementation of the Student Success Act, also known as Senate Bill 736, that has effectively ended teacher tenure and has ramped up the link between standardized test results and teacher evaluation and salary, mandating that evaluations be based half on test in the Senate, says the state’s superintendents are quite concerned about the effects of ending teacher tenure on hiring and retention, although they favor the merit pay provision, provided it’s adequately funded. “Superintendents appreciate the legislature giving them more authority and ability to address teachers who are not performing, but at the same time, removing the possibility of tenure for teachers makes it more difficult for us to attract and retain high-quality teachers,” he says. “To deny them a sense of security has raised concerns among superintendents in Florida. We’ve had four or five merit pay programs in Florida in the last 15 years. We’ve had some good plans. The problem is, they’ve never been funded.” Carvalho hopes that Robinson turns some attention to the disconnects between the testing evaluation systems of the state government and the federal “I would hope he would work closely with superintendents and talk with superintendents, and I believe he will.” —Margaret Smith, superintendent, Volusia County Schools scores. Such issues are nothing new for Robinson, who says he helped move forward with a pilot merit pay program in Virginia through which teachers can earn up to $5,000 above their base salaries. But Boyd says he’s not aware of any district in the country where a program to tie merit pay to evaluations based on test scores has been done successfully. “In Florida, we’re mandated that it will happen, so here we go, marching merrily along,” Boyd says. “When you start using these numbers we generate to determine the … value of a teacher, we’d better be right. The legislature seems to think we have all the pieces in place to do this. Those of us in the field have some reservations about it. It’s going to be a real challenge for the commissioner to make sure this is correct. The reputations of the men and women in the classroom are at stake.” “That’s a fair criticism,” Robinson responds. “Even the researchers who support merit pay say we should” implement rigorous evaluations that go beyond test result comparisons, he adds. Montford, who voted against SB 736 government, which can produce very different results and baffle district administrators and school boards. Florida schools can receive “A” letter grades but still fail to meet adequate yearly progress under No Child Left Behind, and while the federal system looks at eight different subgroups of students, Florida’s has no such breakdown. “There’s now a recognition in our state, but also at the federal level, that we need to provide a more congruent and more logical marriage of both accountability systems,” he says. Class Size On the issue of class size, the new commissioner says he knows a couple of board members have expressed interest in revisiting voter-mandated caps. But voters just reaffirmed their commitment to a 2002 constitutional amendment that requires core subjects to max out at 18 students for K3, 22 for grades 4-8, and 25 in high school. For that reason, other board members look at the system as “the hand we’ve been dealt,” Robinson says, which has become a tougher hand to play in District Administration

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - October 2011

District Administration - October 2011
Contents
From the Editor
Letters
News Update
Transportation Update
District Profile
Administrator Profile
Building a Blended Learning Program
How Are Science Fairs Fairing?
A New Age for Algebra
Early College High Schools
Changing of the Guard in Florida
CIO News
How Much Computing Power Do You Need?
An Unconventional Approach to 1:1
New Books
Problem/ Solution
Research Center
Product Focus
New Products
Professional Opinion
Going Mobile
Online Edge

District Administration - October 2011

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