Critiquing the Florida Formula. Matt Di Carlo at the Shanker Blog is a critic to be taken seriously. In his latest post, he looks at the research that has evaluated different components in Florida’s reform effort, including the competitive pressures from vouchers, tax credit scholarships and charter schools. “As usual,” he writes, “it is a far more nuanced picture than supporters (and critics) would have you believe.”

Legislative wish list. What do education groups want from the coming legislative session? Florida Voices asks Ruth Melton at the Florida School Boards Association; Patricia Levesque at the Foundation for Florida’s Future; Mindy Gould at the Florida PTA; and Kathleen Oropeza at Fund Education Now. Lawmakers, Oropeza writes, are out to “starve public education” and have been “intentionally bringing districts to the brink of catastrophe.”

StudentsFirst report card. Coverage from Florida Today, Orlando Sentinel, StateImpact Florida, Education Week, Fort Myers News Press. Sherman Dorn’s take here.

Online testing problems. They’re still affecting the DOE’s FAIR system. Gradebook.

Jeb Bush headed to Arkansas. He’s scheduled to visit for National School Choice Week, reports Arkansasmatters.com.

More Newtown reaction. Tampa Bay Times. Palm Beach Post. Lakeland Ledger. In Lake County, a school board member wants teachers and principals to carry district-purchased guns, reports the Orlando Sentinel. In Manatee, the interim superintendent wants local law enforcement to inspect every inch of every public school campus, reports the Bradenton Herald.

Delinquency. In public schools, a Florida Department of Juvenile Justice report finds it's down by nearly half over the last eight years, reports News Service of Florida. (more…)

Two candidates for Florida’s education commissioner are former public schoolteachers who worked their way through the ranks to become education leaders. The third is an attorney with experience in education policy and research, who worked for various government and nonprofit agencies devoted to education reform.

All three met with the Florida Board of Education on Tuesday to answer questions and explain why they are the best choice to oversee Florida’s educational system.

Board members expect to name a new commissioner Wednesday morning. Here are highlights from the interviews and applications:

Charles Hokanson Jr. is a Harvard-trained attorney who served as counsel to the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce. He wrote legislation with a focus on special education, early childhood programs and civil rights law, among other areas.

He later served as chief of staff and counsel to the U.S. Department of Education and as deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. Hokanson, who heads Hokanson Consulting Group in Arlington, Va., is also a former president of the Alliance for School Choice.

Hokanson told the board that among his first priorities as commissioner would be to hire a strong chief of staff. That way, Hokanson could travel across the state to reach out to stakeholders, including teachers, parents and superintendents.

He said he would also take time to get to know department personnel, discover strengths and weaknesses in the system, and build trust.

“I would be a commissioner who would start walking the halls,’’ Hokanson said.

He downplayed his lack of school leadership experience, saying he comes from a family of educators. “I’m not a teacher, but I love working in education reform because of the ability to change students’ lives,” Hokanson said.

What does he see for the future in classrooms? “We are going to need to continually address online opportunities,’’ Hokanson said, including blended learning.

In his application, Hokanson highlights his background in strategic planning, along with expertise in federal and state law and a suite of education policies. Having been inside the “belly of the beast,’’ Hokanson said he is poised to continue reforms that have made Florida a national leader. (more…)

The mom on stage described how she and other low-income parents rode a bus through the darkness - six hours, L.A. to Sacramento, kids still in pajamas - to plead their case to power. In the halls of the legislature, people opposed to the idea of a parent trigger accused them of being ignorant, of not understanding how schools work or how laws are made. Some called them a “lynch mob.”

Then, Shirley Ford said, there was this sad reality:

“I would have thought that the PTA would have been beside me,” Ford said. But it wasn’t. “I’m not PTA bashing when I say this,” she continued. “To see that the PTAs were on the opposite side of what we were fighting for was another level of awareness of how the system is.”

Ford is a member of Parent Revolution, the left-leaning group that is advocating for parent trigger laws around the country. She spoke last week at the Jeb Bush education summit, sharing the stage with former California state Sen. Gloria Romero and moderator Campbell Brown. Her remarks, plain spoken and passionate and sometimes interrupted by tears, touched on a point that is vital and obvious and yet too often obscured.

Parents are not a monolith.

The divides are as apparent as the different dynamics that play out in schools on either side of town. In the affluent suburbs, a lot is going right. There is stability in the teaching corps. The vast majority of kids don’t have issues with basic literacy. The high schools are stocked with Advanced Placement classes. And there, behind it all, are legions of savvy, wonderfully dogged, politically connected parents who know how to mobilize when their schools are shortchanged.

The view is starker from the other side of the tracks. A parent in a low-income neighborhood is more likely to see far more teacher turnover in her school – along with far more rookies, subs and dancing lemons. She’ll see far more students labeled disabled and far fewer AP offerings. Issues like these plague many high-poverty schools, yet they don’t get much attention from school boards or news media or, frankly, from established parent groups like the PTA. (more…)

Rick Scott’s education plans. The Orlando Sentinel leads with Scott’s proposal to issue state-funded debit cards to teachers so they no longer reach into their own pockets to pay for school supplies. More from WINK News, Fort Myers News Press, Palm Beach Post. The Florida Democratic Party had a negative reaction, but Scott’s plan generated mostly positive comments, including from the Florida PTA, Sen. Bill Montford of the Florida superintendents association and Wayne Blanton, executive director of the Florida School Boards Association. According to the Associated Press, Blanton “endorsed (Scott’s) recommendation to lift a cap on charter schools with a caveat — as long decisions to create new charters are left to local school officials. ‘An open-ended lifting of the cap may be more than we need,’ Blanton said, adding that districts are having a hard time keeping up with the growth of charters.”

More charter school payout. The principal of NorthStar High School, the charter school whose board paid her more than $500,000 as the failing school was shutting down, consumed the lion’s share of the 180-student school’s funding last year, the Orlando Sentinel reports. "I have never seen an act that egregious in 15 years of working with charters," said State Rep. John Legg, R-Port Richey, a charter school business administrator.

Teachers union bus tour. The AFT bus tour in support of President Obama is rolling through Florida. According to a press release, it's hitting Tampa, Daytona Beach, Ormond Beach, Orlando, Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. AFT President Randi Weingarten is aboard. More from the Hechinger Report.

More Broad Prize coverage. As we noted yesterday, the Miami-Dade school district won this year’s Broad Prize, which goes to the urban district with the most academic progress. More from the Orlando Sentinel, Christian Science Monitor, Associated Press, Education Week. The Palm Beach school district was a finalist, which is also impressive. All this is more reason to routinely compare achievement data district by district in Florida. Also worth noting: Miami-Dade is a poster child for the new definition of public education, with a broad menu of learning options and huge numbers of parents embracing them.

Charter school issues in Volusia. The Volusia school board approves improvement plans for two F-rated charter schools, reports the Daytona Beach News Journal.

PTA doesn’t like it. The Florida PTA pans the Board of Education’s decision to set steeper improvement goals for low-income and minority students, reports the Gradebook blog.

More on Amendment 8. The Tampa Bay Times gets credit for going into detail about the legal case that’s at issue here – a case that has nothing to do with vouchers. ICYMI, our take on Amendment 8 here and here.

So the Democrat supports vouchers? In this state senate race in Central Florida, yes, notes the Orlando Sentinel.

Add Fund Education Now to the list of influential groups who are distorting what Amendment 8 is about. Like the Florida Education Association, the Florida School Boards Association and the Florida PTA, Fund Education Now claims the ballot initiative is really all about vouchers.

The amendment would remove the “no aid” to religion language in the Florida Constitution. That language, Fund Education Now says in its just-released 2012 legislative report card, “has prevented voucher proponents from enacting law to provide state vouchers directly to private religious schools.”

This is false. As we’ve noted before, Florida’s first voucher program wasn’t declared unconstitutional in 2006 because of the no-aid clause; the Florida Supreme Court shot it down because of another constitutional provision that mandates a “uniform” public school system. The court conspicuously avoided the no-aid language, even though a lower court used it, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002, in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, that parents could use public funds to pay for religious schools as long as they were making an independent decision.

On a related note, the Bradenton Herald weighed in today with, as far as we can tell, the first newspaper editorial on Amendment 8. It urges a no vote because “the real goal is future school voucher programs,” but provides no supporting evidence to show why that’s the case.

There’s a legitimate debate to be had over Amendment 8, but it’s not happening. Ironically, it’s educators, public school "defenders" and journalists who are clouding what should be a vigorous exercise in civics.

Everybody loves the underdog except when it comes to education reform. More than a week after the Florida Senate rejected the parent trigger bill, the story line is now David v. Goliath, with David (played by established parent groups like the Florida PTA and Fund Education Now) squeaking out a victory over Goliath (starring Jeb Bush, Michelle Rhee, and the Republican-dominated Legislature.)

The truth is, titans clashed while David was en route to his second job.

The underdogs who are lost in this narrative are low-income and working-class parents. They have virtually no one in their corner as they deal with conditions in their schools that would spark outrage – and quick remedies – if they happened in more affluent schools.

To take teacher quality and equity as an example: High-poverty schools have the highest teacher turnover rates, the most rookie teachers, the most out-of-field teachers, the most teachers who failed certification exams, the fewest board certified, etc.  We all know how destructive that is, year after year, kid after kid, generation after generation. And yet, it’s just kind of accepted. (more…)