Special needs. Being the father of a child with "unique abilities" has motivated Florida Senate President Andy Gardiner's push to create new educational and employment opportunities for people with special needs. Tallahassee Democrat.

Legislation. Testing, school accountability and education funding will be high on the agenda when the Florida Legislature convenes Tuesday. Tampa Bay Times.  Palm Beach Post. (More here). Local funding issues will be on Miami-Dade lawmakers' radar. Miami Herald. Testing is a must-address issue. But other bills may not be. Tampa Bay Times.

Charter schools. A charter school proposal is expected to draw crowds to an often sparsely attended local education panel in South Florida. Palm Beach Post. The Sun-Sentinel writes another editorial criticizing charter school oversight.

Testing. School districts prepare for state testing this week, and the possibility of parents opting out. Tampa Bay Times. Orlando Sentinel. Miami Herald. Fort Myers News-Press. StateImpact. Sarasota Herald-Tribune.  Alachua school district officials encourage teachers to create their own end-of-course exams. Gainesville Sun. Hillsborough's teacher of the year gears up for testing season. Tampa Tribune.

School boards. Wayne Blanton, the longtime leader of the Florida School Boards Association, draws praise as he serves his last day on the job. Tallahassee Democrat. The Collier County School Board plans to bring in an outside facilitator. WINK News.

Superintendent. Hillsborough's outgoing superintendent may be in the running for a leadership post in Palm Beach. Extra Credit.

Administration. Parents at a Volusia County school gather petitions to oust the principal. Daytona Beach News-Journal. Duval teachers sound off about their schools and administrators in a district survey. Florida Times-Union.

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School choice. A political group that supports school choice gets involved in the Democratic primary for a Northeast Florida state House seat. News Service of Florida.

Private schools. A new private school, started by two charter school teachers, is aimed at low-income students in urban Orlando. Orlando Sentinel. A St. Petersburg private school helps gather gift donations for children in the state's Guardian ad Litem program. Tampa Bay Times.

Lawsuits. Parents from around the state are helping to defend Florida's tax credit scholarship program in court. Tampa Tribune. Wayne Blanton of the Florida School Boards Association hits back with an op-ed defending the lawsuit and criticizing the school choice program, which as administered by Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog. South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Charter schools. Many Florida charter schools struggle to comply with state transparency laws requiring them to post financial and governance information on their websites. Naples Daily News. See the paper's analysis here. Watchdog.org looks at charter school growth statistics.

Technology. More federal dollars are going to help schools pay for technology purchases. Tampa Tribune. Flagler schools officials find the digital transition hasn't been as wholesale as they hoped. Daytona Beach News-Journal. A Bevard middle school rolls out a one-to-one inititative. Florida Today. Monroe officials try to combat online threats and cyberbullying. Keynoter.

Teacher evaluations. Districts should follow Hillsborough's lead on teacher evaluations, Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano writes. Some teachers call for changes. Tampa Bay Times. Baker County teachers boast some of the highest VAM scores in the state. WJCT.

STEM. Why not use Bright Futures scholarships to nudge students toward college majors in STEM fields? Paul Cottle raises the idea in the Tallahassee Democrat. Central Florida high school students take part in scientific research on local college campuses. Orlando Sentinel.

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From the News Service of Florida:

The head of the Florida School Boards Association is stepping down in February.

Wayne Blanton, who will have served as executive director of the organization for 30 years when he retires and who worked for the association for 10 years before that, told The News Service of Florida on Tuesday that he's decided it's time.

"Forty years is a long time to do the same thing," said Blanton, 68. He said he will continue working on education issues and will do some consulting work, but not full-time.

"I'm retiring, but not disappearing," Blanton said.

The association represents school boards before the Legislature, state agencies and the federal government.

If truth is the first casualty of war, then Florida School Boards Association executive director Wayne Blanton may have been suiting up back in June. His Capital Dateline interview then with Steve Wilkerson described tax credit scholarships for low-income students as a financial drain not only on public schools but on all state government services.

Blanton, a seasoned educator, knows better. So let’s assume the association’s planned lawsuit against the scholarship, to be announced today, was his motivation.

Blanton’s financial assertion is short enough to quote in full:

“We are not a big fan of those type of scholarships. There’re a couple of reasons. No. 1, it’s taking a substantial amount of money every year away from public schools. But the bigger issue, I think, is over the next two years those corporate scholarships are going to siphon off about 2 to 2 ½ billion dollars from the state. Now making my assumption earlier that we get 36 percent of that, for every $1 billion that would be $360 million that public schools do not get. But then there’s over $600 million that doesn’t come into the state at all. It doesn’t come in for child care, it doesn’t come in for health services, it doesn’t come in for the Division of Family Services and things of that nature, it doesn’t come in for corrections. Those dollars not coming into the state are not just detrimental to public schools, it’s detrimental to a lot of other services the state is trying to deliver and has a hard time getting those dollars to them now. So I think we’ve got to take a real close look at that in the big picture – not just education but how those dollars are disappearing from a lot of other entities.”

Readers should be aware that I’m the policy director for Step Up For Students, a nonprofit that co-hosts this blog and helps administer the scholarship that Blanton calls into question. But his misstatements are at such odds with the fiscal reality that they are rebutted by basic state revenue reports and fiscal evaluations.

Let’s begin with the “siphon.” Under state law, the amount of tax credits that can be used toward contributions for the scholarship is capped every year. The Department of Revenue is responsible for overseeing the cap, and here is the link to its latest calculation. The maximum possible amount for scholarships in the next two years is in fact $805.1 million – not $2.5 billion. That’s one-third the amount that Blanton claimed.

Now let’s look at how the loss of those dollars is “detrimental” to all those public services, including schools. (more…)

In the wake of the school shooting tragedy in Newtown, Conn., traditional public schools aren’t the only ones having serious discussions about how to beef up safety. In Florida, charter schools and private schools are also making sure they’re maximizing protection for students, parents and staff.

But as district officials and state lawmakers debate next steps – and how to pay for them – there is the potential for tensions to surface between different education sectors.

In Broward County, for example, Sen. Eleanor Sobel, D-Hollywood, is proposing a new property tax that could raise $55 million to pay for police officers in every public school operated by the district. It wouldn’t apply to private schools, and Sobel, a former school board member, said she was uncertain if charters would be included, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel recently reported.

Some charter school supporters, meanwhile, are worried about the costs of new safety measures, especially if lawmakers mandate them. That could become a financial burden for charters, which already receive less in per-student funding than districts, and little in the way of capital outlay dollars, said Lynn Norman-Teck of the Florida Consortium of Public Charter Schools.

“It’s going to hurt,’’ Norman-Teck said, and it’s really not right. If lawmakers are going to look at ways to make schools safer, including allocating more dollars to public school districts, she said, they need to “bring charter schools to the table. They need to look at them [charters] as public schools because they are public schools.’’ (more…)

When Florida Gov. Rick Scott unveiled his education agenda last week, he threw out a potentially far-reaching idea: Allowing districts to open their own charter schools.

The proposal could address a common complaint among traditional school districts - that federal and state bureaucracies prevent their schools from being as innovative as charter schools. But how would these District Charter Innovation Schools, as Scott called them, actually work? Would they truly be as flexible as independent charter schools?

We’re waiting to hear more. Scott didn’t spell out specifics, beyond saying the schools would operate with the same funding levels as other charter schools. His press secretary, Jackie Schutz, told redefinED she couldn’t provide any more details.

In the meantime, there may be clues in the handful of district-run charter schools that already have been approved by the state Department of Education. They don’t look like typical charter schools. But in some respects, they do veer from the framework of more traditional public schools.

The Academy for International Education Charter School in Miami Springs is a year-old “hybrid’’ school that offers a curriculum based on magnet and charter school programs, with students learning second and third languages. 

The principal is a 30-year district employee who left the traditional public realm for the charter. The academy has a nonprofit board that is technically independent from the district, but has contracted with the Miami-Dade district for services, including custodial and cafeteria workers. The school also leases space from the district, significantly reducing facility expenses. Miami-Dade district and school officials did not return calls for comment.

In Polk County, DOE approved another district-run, charter endeavor, Step Up Academy, in August. (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.

At an education summit in Fort Myers today, Florida Gov. Rick Scott officially unveiled his education agenda, which included some measures that could expand charter schools. "In business, choice and competition create excellence," he said, according to his prepared remarks. "Increasing options in education will drive increased results for Florida students."

Scott's speech included details about his own upbringing, much of which he has shared before. The governor lived in public housing when he began school, and his family frequently moved because of their financial struggles. "But there were three constants in my life: my Mom, church and school," he said. "My teachers let me know I could learn, and learning was my ticket to the experiences of the world."

Scott's plan drew a fair share of positive comments from business leaders, former Gov. Jeb Bush and others. Wayne Blanton, executive director of the Florida School Boards Association, said in a written statement, "We are particularly impressed with Governor Scott’s recommendations aimed at providing greater flexibility and deregulation to local school districts so that we may customize learning opportunities to fit the needs of students, their families, their communities and local businesses."

Andy Ford, president of the state teachers union, was more cautious, describing the plan as "kind of sketchy," according to the News Service of Florida. Ford also said he wanted to see more accountability for charter schools, telling the News Service, "We have to make sure that we aren't allowing charter schools to cherry-pick students."

Click here to see Scott's prepared remarks in full.