How Florida Charter Schools Are Trying to Exploit School Safety Issue to Get More Funding
From Sherri Ackerman’s post in redefinED:
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.’’
Student safety has dominated discussions among parents, school leaders, politicians and safety
Pinellas SB Member on SB 736: “We are building on a very flawed and invalid system”
From Tampa Bay Times reporters Curtis Krueger and Lisa Gartner:
The School Board unanimously voted on Tuesday to tweak the system Pinellas uses to evaluate teachers — but that doesn’t mean members are happy.
“We are building on a very flawed and invalid system,” board member Linda Lerner said. “I’m voting for this because I think it’s a little better — not because it improves what we have to work with.”
The Florida Legislature required most school systems this year to radically transform how they evaluate teachers, relying on a complicated measure of teacher performance called the “value added measure,” or VAM.
But the plan has come under fire, because many teachers are evaluated based on the performance