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Friday, January 22, 2016

What passes for good policy in Duval County.

Oy Vey, we are in trouble. Dropped on teachers at the last second, though the super might say they asked for it.

 Good morning, 
Below you will find the instructions for accessing student essays for grades 4-5 for those schools that chose utilize the WritetoLearn program. 

The window for the writing portion of the FSA scrimmage closed on January 8th, 2016. Students will have until Friday, January 15th, 2016 to access their essays to assist teachers with addressing instructional implications and guiding students through the writing process to improve student writing. Please have students follow the steps below to access and print their essays. 

Students will: 
1) log in to Write to Learn and select their FSA scrimmage essay. 
2) highlight their entire essay within the essay text box and press Ctrl C to copy the essay. 
3) open a Microsoft Word document and press Ctrl V to paste the essay into the word document. 

In order to capture the student feedback, students must take a screen shot of the page by pressing Ctrl PrtSc and then pressing Ctrl V to paste the feedback into the Word document. As taking a screen shot of the student essay page will not show the entire student essay, it is essential that students follow steps one through three to capture their entire essay. Once all necessary components have been added to the word document, it is suggested that students print their essays. After January 15th, students will not be able to access their essays and feedback. 

Please note
* Students that did not receive a score have all been scored by the District 3-5 ELA team. 
**For students in grade 4, overall scores will follow a conversion based on the writing rubric comparison below.  The conversion chart can be used to determine the final score for students scoring between a one and a five.  Please note that the conversion was determined by randomly selecting students from each grade level and applying Florida’s Informative/Explanatory text-based writing rubric. 
Florida Rubric and WriteToLearn
College and Career Readiness Rubric Comparison

Language Arts Florida Standards Scoring
Purpose, Focus and Organization
Evidence and Elaboration
Conventions of Standard English




4
x
x

3
x
x

2
x
x
x
1
x
x
x
0


x

WriteToLearn Scoring
Task and Focus
Organization
Development of Ideas
Language and Style
Conventions






4
x
x
x
x
x
3
x
x
x
x
x
2
x
x
x
x
x
1
x
x
x
x
x
0





  
Dr. Holli N. Fears
Director, Reading Language Arts
Educational Excellence! Every school. Every classroom. Every student. Every day!


From a  frustrated teacher
Did you get all that? She wanted us to have our students log back on, copy and paste their entire essays, and take multiple screenshots of the feedback. She also wanted us to print all of them out when only my laptop has the ability to print. Should I pass my laptop around to my ten year olds and let them do it? Is that what she wants? She gave us a week to do it in, but we actually only got two days since our useless reading specialist didn't bother to forward the message. We have between 40-50 kids assigned to each reading teacher and they gave us two days? Then she wanted the fourth grade teachers to convert their scores to the correct rubric because the district didn't bother to use the correct scale? The whole point of using the computer program was to save teachers from having to do extra work. Holli Fears is an embarrassment to an already embarrassing district. The circus continues. 

11 comments:

  1. How can anyone deny that Duval is nothing more than a test preparation factory? Opt Out, Parents, please, for the good of all that matters, OPT OUT!

    ReplyDelete
  2. "Educational Excellence! Every school. Every classroom. Every student. Every day!"

    Our motto doesn't mention anything about excellence at the district office on any day.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sounds like Duval Cty Education System is in a mell of a hess!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. As if that's not bad enough, our school doesn't have printers because the district stopped supplying toner. Our "central printer" has had the toner cartridge removed because teachers were printing too much. When an entire school is printing to one printer I'm sure it is a lot of copies. We couldn't even print out our VAM scores for the principal to sign. We can't access CAST at home to print out scores, and we don't have printers at school. Dr. Fears needs to explain how we are to print these out when we don't have access to any printers.

    Duval is a huge mess and I'm looking at other counties.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anybody missing Ed Pratt-Dannals yet?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Don't do it! Thus us ridiculous, and I'll be sure to tell my daughter once in school that these tests don't matter. So sorry for teachers and these kids. I have got to say with this happening to teachers, no wonder we are in such dire straits

    ReplyDelete
  7. I think we should extend Vitti's contract, but only after we give him a raise.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You must think the Jaguars performance over the last 3 years is peachy keen!

      Delete
  8. "On Wednesday, 88 of Detroit’s roughly 100 public schools were closed in the latest mass teacher "sickouts"...
    http://www.democracynow.org/2016/1/21/detroit_rocked_by_teachers_sickout_protesting

    $10 per hour and fulltime work is better for your health in the long run than working as a teacher.

    ReplyDelete
  9. We are so busy doing stupid stuff, that even fire drills are going down the toilet. We have only had one drill since the school year started, and when the real deal came along, it was an evacuation due to a b*** threat. The first thing the kids did was evacuate to the area in the back and refused to leave the sidewalk. They then decided they were not going to muddy their shoes and stand near the building. It took quite a bit, but teachers finally convinced the kids that we could not stand near the building. We were lucky this time, but some crazy person may have been there to see the weak spot and may act upon it next time. We are such a wonderful testing nation but clearly nothing else matters, not even safety preparation and forget about messing up paper for copies the children need!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Lets talk about them having business teachers teaching technology without computers! Or, let's try the latest where the test that kids take is tied to my ability to keep my job, but has nothing to do with what I teach! The test is based on typing skills that Mavis Beacon know, something we are not allowed to teach anymore! The district is a joke and they have the nerve to short change us with raises and decent salaries. Finally, let's talk about the fact that they are willing to spend money on Hero but we can't get enough money to buy materials that are even remotely related to what is on the curriculum guide assessment. I guess I am going to have to pull what I need out of my a** to make this crap work!

    ReplyDelete