My wife, Barbara, just returned from a week in Reno, Nev., along with two students from Clay County, Fla., and a coworker, Brenda Weeks. They attended the International Science and Engineering Fair.
This was her first trip to the International and that may account for the exuberance she displayed about the trip. Especially when she called me from Reno one morning to exclaim: “They won, Lamar, they won.” Then she broke down in tears.
The “they” in question are Mitchell Stecker and Alex Gandzyura, juniors at Ridgeview High School, who finished third and fourth in their respective divisions at the fair. Note that this is the INTERNATIONAL fair, meaning that they beat out students from all over the world, more than 1,500 I’m told. Quite an accomplishment by two exemplary young men from one small, rural county, and especially from one high school.
I won’t begin to try to explain what their projects were about but if you are interested, you can find out more by clicking here.
Barbara put it best when she said, “Lo0king at these kids, I know that we don’t have to worry about the future of the world.” Read the rest of this entry »
Tuesday, May 5, is my birthday, and while that doesn’t have anything directly to do with this story, I mention it as a way of telling you that the month leading up to the 65th celebration of my birth has been enormously satisfying — and possibly even life-changing. More about that later. Right now, let’s talk about the satisfying parts. In the past month, I:
Visited an elderly aunt and took her out to lunch on her birthday
Visited a bed-riddden cousin in a nursing home
Spent three days at Easter with all six grandchildren and took them to church Easter Sunday
Spent a few days with my sister and favorite uncle in the Tampa area
Attended my eldest son Robert’s acting performance in the play Holy Ghost
Took two of my grandsons to play golf
Played golf with a Rotary friend
Attended a most satisfying elementary school musical with my wife and three of our six grandchildren
Finished it off by listening to another son, Joe, sing at a charity concert a song he wrote honoring my father and I.
Of course, most of these activities, except the golf, were shared with my companion and love of my life, my wife, Barbara. So truly, I have been blessed with an exceptional month. Read the rest of this entry »
The nation’s oft-criticized systems for evaluating the quality of its educator workforce are poised to receive increased scrutiny, thanks to an Obama administration plan to require school districts to disclose how many teachers perform well or poorly.
Although nearly every state requires districts to evaluate teachers, the instruments are typically designed locally. And as both policy experts and some union leaders attest, they are frequently of poor quality, not based on standards of good teaching, and incapable of rendering fine-grained, fair judgments about teacher performance.
Policy experts widely view the U.S. Department of Education initiative, which is part of the implementation of the federal economic-stimulus package’s aid to education, as an attempt to collect baseline data on teacher evaluations and to promote an overhaul of those systems.
Yachts! The Florida Legislature is going to pass a new tax break for buying luxury yachts and private airplanes.
Let’s hope this passes in the same year that the Legislature hurts the K-12 schools, guts the universities, makes it harder for Floridians to vote, drains the Lawton Chiles tobacco trust, kills Florida Forever, weakens wetlands protection, repeals a quarter-century of growth management law, deregulates the telephone companies and tries to paper over the indictment of the immediate past speaker of the House of Representatives and a damning grand jury investigation.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today started rolling out $44 billion in economic-stimulus aid for education that comes with new teacher-quality reporting requirements for states and districts, and also with significantly more spending flexibility on school construction than many administrators had expected.
New guidance from the Department of Education spells out in more detail how states, districts, and institutions of higher education will receive money under the $39.8 billion State Fiscal Stabilization Fund and the $8.8 billion Government Services Fund, as well as how they may use it. Unveiling the first payments at a school in Capitol Heights, Md., Mr. Duncan emphasized that the funding could be a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.
“We have this magical opportunity to invest significantly in these best practices and scale up what works,” he said of aid under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Online classes may be a relatively young instructional practice for K-12 schools, but experts already generally agree on one point: Research shows that virtual schooling can be as good as, or better than, classes taught in person in brick-and-mortar schools.
But that broad conclusion, which comes mainly from a couple of research syntheses published in 2001 and 2004, masks a lot of variation in the designs of online classes and in who takes them. A middle school student in a remote area of West Virginia, for example, might take his online Spanish class during 3rd period every day, in a classroom alongside his classmates, while in Detroit, a gifted high school student logs in to her forensic-science class at home and works alone and at her own pace.
“We know it’s ‘as good as, if not better,’ in terms of student achievement,” says Rick E. Ferdig, an associate professor of educational technology at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, who runs the Virtual School Clearinghouse research project. The project enables states to analyze their own statistics and pool data, making it publicly available for researchers to conduct studies.
TALLAHASSEE – The chief of the Florida Lottery waited eight months to follow legislative orders to seek new offers for the agency’s lucrative advertising work, then skirted a legislative order to seek competitive proposals.
All that time, Lottery Secretary Leo DiBenigno kept the existing advertising agency on the payroll on a month-to-month basis and paid the company more money for extra work.
A legislative committee grilled DiBenigno over his decisions for 90 minutes Tuesday. It was by far the most critical interrogation of any of Gov. Charlie Crist’s agency heads since he took office in 2007.
”This time, we did not get the results we wanted,” said Rep. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla, chairman of the House Government Operations Appropriations Committee.
Last year, the Legislature made clear it wanted the Lottery to find a new vendor for the $3.5 million set aside for advertising in place of Cooper DDB, a Miami firm hired in 2002 that employs former lottery secretary David Griffin as a lobbyist.
NOTE: This is a legislative update from Emergent Design and Development, a Tallahassee consulting firm that advises clients about education matters.
From Bob and Mary Bedford
The session is progressing with the release of the Senate Budget – and the House budget is expected to be released this week.In somewhat of a surprise, both Houses have included the stimulus money for Education.The budgets will not be identical and most educators will probably favor the Senate Position.
COMMISSIONER NOTES
After having an opportunity to hear Education Commissioner Eric Smith make several presentations last week, I believe that the following bullets represent actions that we can expect as a result of this Session.
Florida will be granted a waiver and receive stimulus money.(Possibly as early as next week.)
Stimulus dollars will come with strict accountability guidelines, including fiscal audits and educational audits to assure that the money will result in improved student outcomes.
This story was reported in the Orlando Sentinel recently. It is a scenario that is undoubted played out in school districts around the state of Florida.
By Leslie Postal |Sentinel Staff Writer
Courtney Coker graduated from Florida State University in 2006 eager to start work as a music teacher. It wasn’t hard to turn her passion into a paycheck.
“It was teacher shortage, teacher shortage, teacher shortage,” Coker said. “I had no problem finding my first job. Everybody I knew found a job.”
Now, three years later, the band director at Blankner School in Orlando finds herself consumed with fear that her dream job will soon be gone. Like thousands of teachers across Florida, she worries the state’s financial crisis could push her into the ranks of the unemployed.
Whether you like his ideas or not, you have to admire the way Clay County School Board Chairman Charlie Van Zant Jr. thinks outside the box in trying to come up with methods to cut expenses for the cash-strapped system.
Earlier this year, Van Zant broached the subject of a four-day school schedule. I think he knew he wouldn’t get much support for the unpopular idea but he put it out there anyway.
Now, Van Zant wants to hear from the public about another idea he has: a longer school day that would result in fewer teaching days in the school calendar year.
Van Zant says there are two bills in the Legislature that would make it possible to change the actual numbers of days taught, thus possibly saving money. Scenarios running from adding 20 to 40 to 60 extra minutes a day could shorten the mandated 180-school year by X number of days if the Legislature passes versions of the two bills. Read the rest of this entry »
posted
May 19, 2009 by Lamar Thames
My wife, Barbara, just returned from a week in Reno, Nev., along with two students from Clay County, Fla., and a coworker, Brenda Weeks. They attended the International Science and Engineering Fair.
