Top 10 again. Education Week ranks Florida No. 6 this year in its annual Quality Counts report. redefinED. Orlando Sentinel. Associated Press.

Teacher evals. StateImpact Florida writes about the new Gates study on the best way to identify the best teachers. SchoolZone notes it. Jay P. Greene rips it. District officials in Palm Beach County don’t feel good about the new, state-mandated system, reports the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

Common Core. Reformers have to win the messaging battle, writes Mike Thomas at the EdFly Blog: “Our success in passing school reforms has had more to do with prevailing in legislative bodies than prevailing in the public arena. This has led to a dangerous neglect of the need for marketing. We now are paying the price for that as our opponents vigorously fight back, defining reform as an attack on public schools that is degrading the quality of education. That this isn’t true doesn’t matter. Sound bites often trump data.”

Rezoning retreat. After affluent parents complain, Seminole district officials back away from plans to equalize the number of low-income students at each school. Orlando Sentinel.

Fire them. Hillsborough Superintendent MaryEllen Elia recommends firing two aides and demoting a principal and assistant principal in the aftermath of the drowning of a special needs student. Tampa Bay Times. Tampa Tribune.

More school safety. Tampa Bay Times. StateImpact Florida. Panama City News Herald. (more…)

Grad rates rising: Florida’s grad rate jumped nearly 4 percentage points in 2012, to 74.5 percent, the biggest one-year jump since 2003, the Orlando Sentinel reports. Full DOE report for districts and individual schools here. The DOE press release announcing the news was sent out at 5:42 p.m. Friday and that, unfortunately, may have limited coverage. Coverage from Gradebook here and here. Sherman Dorn’s take here.

College remediation rates still too high. StateImpact Florida, first in a series.

That charter school again. NorthStar High School, the same failing Orange County charter school that gave its principal more than $500,000 as it was closing its doors, also paid her husband more than $460,000 over a five-year period, the Orlando Sentinel reports.

Praise for Florida’s reforms. And bipartisanship. Julia Johnson, a former state Board of Education member, writes on both in USA Today.

Zoning woes in Palm Beach. One parent upset about proposed boundary changes for a popular elementary schools tells the Palm Beach Post: “We moved specifically to put our daughter into a better school.” A school board member who represents the school, meanwhile, says dozens of parents are “faking” their addresses so their children can attend.