Florida ed reform: ‘A danger of all this imploding’
President Obama and former Florida governor Jeb Bush in 2011. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images North America)
Educators in Florida have been screaming for some time about the irrationality of the state’s standardized test-based school accountability system — which is being sold around the country by former governor Jeb Bush as a model for education reform. But now the powerful president of the Florida Senate, Republican Don Gaetz, has become part of the chorus.
Gaetz said in an interview with the Florida Current that the system used to evaluate teachers and schools — which is based largely on the highly controversial Florida Comprehensive Assessment Tests — is too complicated. “There’s a danger of all this imploding and causing a real credibility problem for the Department of Education,” he said.
That’s an understatement. The teacher evaluation system is so skewed that some teachers are being evaluated on the standardized test scores of students that they never taught. Really. Read all about it here.
Of course, Florida education officials have had a credibility