Tagged: education

The State Board of Education will get an update next week on Florida’s next education standards, the Common Core State Standards.

The meeting will include information about the technology needed to implement the new assessments that are scheduled to begin in early 2015.

Education Commissioner Tony Bennett says he will have more information next week about plans for implementing new education standards known as Common Core.

The State Board of Education is meeting next week.

“We have rolled out a very aggressive implementation plan,” Bennett said. “We know that we have to be fully implemented and prepared to teach and assess these standards in 2014-15.”

Florida and 45 other states are transitioning to Common Core.

Patricia Levesque runs two foundations created by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — the Foundation for Florida’s Future and the Foundation for Excellence in Education.

A loose-knit network of education activists generally opposed to the direction Florida has been taking its schools recently is attempting to organize into a more potent political force.

The groups include parents, people who want more state funding for schools, and others who are fed up with the brand of testing-based school accountability that Florida has become famous for. Under the umbrella of the Alliance for Public Schools, they are hoping to bolster their fundraising capacity and step up their efforts to influence legislation at the statehouse.

More than half of Florida’s Hispanic and black students at state universities currently eligible for the state’s Bright Futures college scholarship would no longer qualify when new standards take effect on July 1, according to a University of South Florida analysis obtained by the Florida College Access Network.

By comparison, about 40 percent of white and Asian students at state universities would no longer be eligible for the scholarship.

The Florida House has released its proposed budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

Speaker Will Weatherford says education was prioritized over everything else.

“The big winner is education,” Weatherford said. “We invested over a billion dollars into our K-12 education system from last year.”

He said that amounts to a 6.2 percent increase in overall education funding.

Weatherford said they created “a silo of funds” to be funneled down to the districts, including up to $676 million available for teacher pay.

A business advocacy group is running television ads that say Florida might have to cut education funding if the state expands Medicaid health coverage.

The National Federation of Independent Business has also set up a website — FloridaCanDoBetter.com.

Third grade students will spend at least eight hours a year taking Florida’s next standardized test, with high school juniors will spend nearly 10 hours to complete the new online standardized test.

March 1 is the deadline for Congress to strike a budget deal or a series of automatic spending cuts totaling $1.2 trillion over a decade takes effect.

Supporters say the charter school bill that has a good chance of passing Florida’s Republican controlled Legislature this year will better regulate charters and expand choices for parents.

One thing the bill won’t do is require the same evaluations for charter school teachers as traditional public school teachers.