Monthly Archives: January 2016

The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Education sweetened the Best and Brightest program for teachers in high-needs schools yesterday before passing it on to the full House Appropriations Committee. The language amended to the Best and Brightest program was this: Annually, … Continue reading →

Democratic State Senator Jeremy Ring, who represents a district in Broward County and is a former executive at Yahoo, has become a lightning rod because of his bill (SB 468) that would raise the profile of computer programming education by … Continue reading →

In a recent issue of the Tallahassee Democrat, Johanne Deremble, Director of the Alliance Francaise of Tallahassee, complained about a proposal by Florida State Senator Jeremy Ring (SB 468) to allow computer coding to substitute for the foreign language requirements for … Continue reading →

Both high school physics and calculus are featured in Florida’s media today. A story on WUSF radio by Robin Sussingham titled “The Anemic State Of High School Physics In Florida” describes Florida’s below-national-average physics enrollment rate and the challenge of … Continue reading →

As has been pointed out by many others, I am not a social scientist.  But I’m an education policy hobbyist.  In fact, I chaired the American Physical Society’s Education Policy Committee for a year (after chairing the society’s Committee on … Continue reading →

The Florida Best and Brightest Teacher Scholarship Program advanced out of the Senate PreK-12 Committee yesterday on a split 6-5 “favorable” vote in which the bill’s Senate sponsor voted no, another Republican voted “yes” while saying she is opposed to … Continue reading →

On Wednesday, the PreK-12 Committee of the Florida Senate will consider two proposals for recruiting new STEM teachers for the state’s K-12 schools.  Both proposals are deeply flawed and should be rejected by the committee.  Instead, the committee should amend … Continue reading →

Since the subject of how salaries impact the shortage of math and science teachers didn’t come up during yesterday’s discussion, I thought it would be appropriate to repost this plot of starting salaries from the American Community Survey and fivethirtyeight.com. … Continue reading →

Florida’s high schools have a computer science problem:  There isn’t very much. There are about 190,000 12th graders in Florida’s public high schools this fall (according to the Florida Department of Education). But there are only 1,994 students registered for … Continue reading →

The Tallahassee Democrat, like most newspapers, sets limits on the lengths of op-eds – in the Democrat’s case that is 500 words.  That makes a lot of sense, and I am grateful for the opportunity to share at the Democrat. That said, the op-ed … Continue reading →