Monthly Archives: August 2015

It’s a real possibility that Florida could replace at least part of its high school testing program with the SAT or ACT, so yesterday’s release of state-by-state ACT results for the high school graduating class of 2015 is of particular … Continue reading →

Travis Pillow from redefinEDonline deserves a hat tip for tweeting about the Politico article quoted here. When Seminole County Superintendent of Schools Walt Griffin tossed out a suggestion that Florida abandon its present statewide standardized testing program and instead use … Continue reading →

Pinellas County is preparing to tackle the problems of the five south county elementary schools that have been labeled “Failure Factories” by the Tampa Bay Times by designating several of those schools as magnet schools.  But the magnet school scheme has limits, … Continue reading →

Of course, that former committee chair is me. Starting with my comments on the Big Bang Theory TV show and how it perpetuates stereotypes about physicists, Michael Quirk at the Key West Citizen did a really nice job describing what the … Continue reading →

Mark Schneider, a Vice President and Institute Fellow at the American Institutes for Research, argued on the AIR’s InformED blog that bachelors’ degrees in science do not lead to high salaries, and so we need to drop the “S” from … Continue reading →

The Monroe County School District, which placed 8th in the Orlando Sentinel’s math and science rankings and is 11th in Florida in high school physics-taking rate, is preparing a push to improve further, or to go from “good to great” in the words … Continue reading →

Seminole County’s education leaders are pushing a plan to replace many of Florida’s statewide standardized tests with national tests in an effort to address overtesting and the technical problems that plagued the state’s move to put many of its tests … Continue reading →

When it comes to making a point, there is no substitute for numbers. Last week’s Tampa Bay Times story about five elementary schools where black children are sent to die academically relies on numbers about the schools’ racial makeup and … Continue reading →

On the Wednesday after the Orlando Sentinel published its Math and Science Rankings, and the day after the same paper published a strongly worded editorial arguing for the improvement of math and science education, the paper published a letter from a … Continue reading →

Connor Oswald has updated the Physics District Index for the February 2015 enrollment counts and to include AICE and IB physics courses.  The results are shown below. But the story is the same:  If a district’s leadership and the principals … Continue reading →