Kiera Wilmot. Prosecutors won't file criminal charges against Kiera Wilmot, the Polk County student who has become a cause celebre after igniting a small chemical explosion on school grounds, reports the Lakeland Ledger. Beth Kassab says the arrest took things way too far. In the aftermath, neighboring Orange will get clarification on its zero tolerance policies, reports SchoolZone. Huffington Post op-ed: "Five ways to stop a black scientist."

Online learning. Privatization, everywhere. Bradenton Herald.

School choice. A private transportation option - at $1,350 annually per student - has emerged for students in Brevard's district choice schools, reports Florida Today.  The Palm Beach County school board is urged to move ahead with plans to create an all-boys middle school, reports the Palm Beach Post.

School administration. Pinellas Superintendent Mike Grego shuffles the team at the top. Gradebook.

School uniforms. The Volusia school board plans to again discuss the possibility - for students and teachers. Daytona Beach News Journal. (more…)

AP results. Florida students rank No. 4 in the nation in the percentage of graduates passing an AP exam. redefinED. Tampa Bay Times. Miami Herald. Tallahassee Democrat. Orlando Sentinel. CBS Miami. Florida Today. Associated Press. Fort Myers News Press.

Tutoring oversight. The Tampa Bay Times elevated a handful of bad actors to taint the overall tutoring effort in Florida and ridicules a program championed by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy to help low-income families, writes Steve Pines, executive director of the Education Industry Association, in an op-ed response to the Times series and editorial.

Teacher evals and school grades. Despite the concern of Education Commission Tony Bennett and others, the two systems are not meant to be in sync. Shanker Blog.

More conspiracy! Now in Education Week.

Class size flexibility. There's bipartisan support for a bill to provide that. StateImpact Florida.

Common Core. Florida Education Commissioner Tony Bennett talks more about the why's behind Plan B. Education Week. (more…)

Words such as voucher, privatization, profit and corporation are often used as weapons by individuals and groups who oppose parental empowerment and school choice. Using words as weapons is especially common during periods of significant social change - we all do it - but the practice undermines civic discourse and makes finding common ground more difficult.

“Market” is another term school choice opponents use to connote evil, but our way of life is largely based on markets, and public education is increasingly embracing market processes as customized teaching and learning become more common. Our challenge moving forward is regulating public education markets in ways that maximizes their effectiveness and efficiency.

People access products and services in one of two ways. Either their government assigns them, or they choose for themselves. In the United States, we have historically allowed citizens to choose, and this system of provider and consumer choice is a “market.”

In a goods and services market, providers decide which goods and services they want to sell, and consumers choose those they want to buy. Markets, when implemented properly, are preferable to assignment systems because they better utilize people’s knowledge, skills and motivation. Citizens are allowed to use their own experiences and judgments when making selling and purchasing decisions, and this citizen empowerment maximizes the universe of ideas from which improvement and innovation derive.

When governments assign products and services to their citizens, they rely on a small group of people to decide what to offer. This top-down approach is less open, transparent and effective than the decision-making that occurs in markets, and it discourages creativity. This is why most improvements in goods and services emerge from market systems rather than government assignment systems.

Markets allow providers to learn from consumers. When governments dictate to consumers what goods and services they may have, their citizens’ true wants and needs are not fully considered. The voice of the customer is silent. But when consumers are empowered to choose for themselves, providers learn from these choices and adjust accordingly. In markets, this necessity to meet customers’ needs drives innovation and continuous improvement. (more…)

Charter school performance. StateImpact Florida gives more ink to University of Central Florida Professor Stanley Smith. His latest analysis finds little difference in academic performance between charter schools and district schools in Florida.

Grad rates. The new, tougher federal formula could backfire if states ease up on their graduation requirements, writes the EdFly Blog. Declining rates in Citrus County are “a black eye for schools, but a gut punch for the community,” editorializes the Citrus County Chronicle.

Guidance counselors. Most of the state’s public schools would be required to hire more under a bill filed by Sen. Nancy Detert, R-Venice, reports the Tallahassee Democrat.

Tony Bennett’s contract. Gradebook.

School security. Tampa Bay Times. Tampa Tribune. South Florida Sun Sentinel. Gainesville Sun.

Principal misconduct. A Duval principal is demoted over testing issues. Florida Times Union.

“Peaceful coexistence.” Sometimes there is tension when schools share campuses. Lakeland Ledger.

Editor's note: Step Up For Students president Doug Tuthill wrote the following letter, which was published this morning in the Tampa Bay Times. It's in response to this Times editorial about testing for students in Florida's tax credit scholarship program and recent comments from Gov. Rick Scott. Some recent news stories have also suggested that testing for scholarship students is limited or nonexistent.

Florida's public education system is so rich with learning options that last year 1.3 million students chose something other than their assigned neighborhood school. So the debate about how best to hold these diverse programs accountable for student progress is important.

Unfortunately, the manner in which the Times questioned testing for one of those programs — a Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students — was incomplete and misleading. While it is true scholarship students are not required to take the FCAT, that doesn't mean the test most of them take annually, the Stanford Achievement, is irrelevant. This test is considered the gold standard in national exams, and has now been administered for six years with two consistent findings: 1) The students choosing the scholarship were the lowest performers in their district schools; and 2) They are achieving the same test gains in reading and math as students of all incomes nationally.

The expansion of options such as magnet programs, charter schools, virtual schools and scholarships for low-income children strengthens public education. These options all undergo rigorous academic evaluation, and the new national Common Core standards will hopefully make comparative evaluations even easier for parents and the public.

Standardized test costs. They total about $1.7 billion a year nationwide, according to a new report from Brookings that includes state-by-state figures. Not much, concludes researcher Matt Chingos, who adds “perhaps we’re spending less than we should.” Coverage from Education Week and Huffington Post. Former Florida education commissioner Gerard Robinson tells the latter about test anxiety: “I won't pretend that tests don't matter and there's no anxiety -- but I also tell people there's anxiety with sex. There's anxiety with sex, but there isn't any talk about getting rid of that.”

And still more Jeb summit coverage. Politic365 on the “Florida Formula.” EdFly Blog on the crucial center. Rick Hess on "The Common Core Kool-Aid."

More protests from Hillsborough parents. They want better training for employees who work with special-needs children, StateImpact Florida reports. More from Tampa Bay Times.

As a group, low-income students struggle more than their wealthier peers. But in Florida, poor kids in some districts do a lot better than poor kids in others.

In Seminole County, for example, 56 percent of third graders eligible for free- and reduced-price scored at grade level or above on this year’s FCAT reading test, according to new state Department of Education data. In Duval County, meanwhile, 39 percent did. Among the state’s biggest districts, Seminole has one of the lowest rates of low-income kids. But so does Duval. And the low-income kids in Miami-Dade, which has the highest rate (nearly 20 percentage points higher than Duval), easily outpaced their counterparts in Duval. They did so in every tested grade, by an average of nine percentage points.

So what gives?

I’m not sure. But I think it’s worth a closer look.

We compare schools to each other so we can learn from those that make more progress. Ditto for states. Education Week’s annual Quality Counts report puts states side by side. It’s thoughtful and useful. It’s time for a similar spotlight on Florida school districts, which include some of the nation’s largest urban districts and an average enrollment among the top 10 of 165,000 students. Anybody could take the lead in setting that up – the press, parent groups, researchers, lawmakers, state education officials, maybe even the districts themselves.

Even with state mandates, districts have considerable leeway. Taking a closer look at achievement data district by district would spark more discussion about which ones are employing policies and programs that make the biggest difference for kids. The variation is endless. Some districts put more disability labels on minority students. Some put a premium on career academies. Some focus on principal development. Some have stronger superintendents. Some face more competition from charter schools and tax credit scholarships. How do things like that factor into district-to-district gaps? I’m sure it’s difficult to sort one from another, and impossible to draw definitive conclusions. But we won’t develop better hunches without looking at the data and talking about it.

A deeper dive into FCAT scores is one place to start. Most of the data I’m referring to is posted every year by the DOE, a few months after FCAT scores are released in late spring and early summer. It’s fascinating stuff – a breakdown of scores by district, subject, grade, FCAT level – and by all kinds of subgroups. I’ve talked to enough bona fide researchers about these numbers to know they raise fascinating questions.

Take Duval again. (more…)

It does sound nefarious: The people who back accountability for Florida public schools, the argument goes, are really out to mine huge sums of money from their degradation and demise. In a weekend op-ed for the Orlando Sentinel, Florida teachers union president Andy Ford (pictured here) mashed the privatization button hard in panning the state’s “flawed and punitive” ed reforms. The accountability system, he wrote, has been “endlessly promoted by legislators who favor for-profit schools, and the Florida Chamber of Commerce.” The state’s standardized test has been “abused by politicians and those wanting to make a profit off public schools and students.” The job of state education commissioner has “devolved into one solely focused on implementing the marching orders of Jeb Bush and the corporate community.”

Yikes! But if all of those folks really were out to make public schools look awful (so profiteers could swoop to the rescue with charter schools and vouchers) they’ve done a miserable job. As we’ve noted before, one key indicator after another and one credible, independent report after another has found Florida’s public school students – especially its poor and minority students – have, over the past 10 to 15 years, improved as fast as students in just about any other state. Matthew Ladner, a researcher at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, has more on this point today at Jay P. Greene’s Blog:

Notice that the “good ole days” in Florida (pre-reform) were a disaster for low-income children. A whopping 37% of Florida’s low-income 4th graders had learned to read according to NAEP’s standards in 1998. A lack of transparency and accountability may have suited the FEA fine, but it was nothing less than catastrophic for Florida’s low-income children. Thirteen years into the “flawed” system, that figure was up to 62 percent. The goal of Florida policymakers should clearly be to accelerate this impressive progress rather than to go back to the failed practices of the past.

Put another way, if Mr. Ford considers this system “flawed” then Florida lawmakers should quickly implement something that he would judge to be “catastrophically flawed.”

As part of his education "listening tour"  this week, Florida Gov. Rick Scott outlined his guiding principles on education in a letter yesterday to Steven Halverson, chairman of the influential Florida Council of 100. Especially coming after Scott's recent comments about "teaching to the test," the letter includes some interesting language about teachers. Like this:

"We cannot declare war on teachers and simultaneously ask them to drive our students toward success," wrote Scott, who signed legislation last year that ended tenure for new teachers and changed the way teachers are paid and evaluated. "We must work with teachers to declare war on failure."

The letter also includes a nod to parental empowerment and school choice: "Choices and competition in educating students in college and careers should be encouraged and held accountable to ensure the best options are available to Florida students regardless of where they live. Just as in business, competition drives innovation and improvement. Programs that succeed should be replicated and feel pressure to constantly improve."

Full letter here.

Florida: State education commissioner Gerard Robinson, a former president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, resigns amidst tumult over the state's accountability system (Tampa Bay Times). Robinson says the move was for family reasons (Tampa Bay Times). Critics of Florida's education reforms see an opportunity to change direction (News Service of Florida).

Louisiana: There are far more applicants than seats available in Louisiana's new voucher program, leaving thousands of parents and students out of luck. (New Orleans Times-Picayune)

Wisconsin: Private school vouchers are a central issue in a Democratic primary for a state assembly seat in Milwaukee. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Maine: On the birthday of school choice champion Milton Friedman, choice proponents in Maine promise another legislative push for an expansion of learning options. (Bangor Daily News)

Mississippi: Gov. Phil Bryant pushes for charter schools as part of his education reform package (Jackson Clarion Ledger). Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves also says he'll continue pushing for legislation to boost charter schools despite the failure of a charter school proposal during the last session (Memphis Commercial Appeal).

North Carolina: The state board of education is set to consider allowing 25 new charter schools across 13 counties next year. (Associated Press)

South Carolina: Parents and teachers talk up the positives of a new charter school in the Myrtle Beach area. (Myrtle Beach Online)

Nevada: A state lawmaker proposes a voucher bill that would give parents half of the state's per-student funding to send their children to private schools. (Las Vegas Review Journal)