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Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Is Commissioner Stewart setting up Florida to fail?

I would like you to read the following passages from the Tampa Times:
The state superintendents association had been lobbying for temporary suspension of the A-F grading system.
We think it’s critical to get it right before we impose any penalties,” Orange County Superintendent Barbara Jenkins said, speaking on behalf of the Florida Association of District School Superintendents. “Teacher pay for performance, administrative pay for performance, graduation, promotion -- all of those high-stakes measures need to be dealt with gently and precisely in any school grading system.”
But Stewart said even a brief hiatus from the accountability system would hurt children.
“If we don’t issue those grade that first year, what will happen [is] that same shock will just be delayed by a year,” she said.

What do you think she meant when using the word shock? I mean when I get a shock it’s never a good thing, it’s unexpected and almost always bad. It seems to me Mrs. Stewart thinks something unexpected and bad is going to happen.

Let’s see if there are any signs that point to this.

We don’t have the replacement for the FCAT lined up and even if we did Mrs. Stewart says there is no reason we should field test it. Though since many schools and districts don’t have the computers or bandwidth to pull it off maybe that’s a good thing.


Throw in Stewart’s assertion Common Core isn’t going to cost anything extra and her disregarding the superintendents’ association, the parent teacher association and the teachers unions concerns about our accountability system preferring to go with her own tweaks, and then I think we may be in for a shock, though a disaster is a firm possibility too.

Shocking right?

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