Friday, September 27, 2013
Result data from 2013 EOC Data by District & School
Over 133,000 students participated in the May 2013 EOC assessment for American History. Click 'HERE' for the results showing how many students participated in the assessment and what percent scored in the top, middle, and bottom 'third' of each county and each participating school. These results mark the first time Florida has ever known what percent of its students scored in their understanding of American History in comparison to others in the state. Currently, for every percent of students scoring in the top third category adds ONE PERCENT to each school's overall GRADE on the Florida School Report Card. School and district administrators will therefore undoubtedly begin to pay more attention to Social Studies in the future.
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
By Joshua Rhett
Miller Published May 31,
2013 FoxNews.com
It's low
self-esteem and the need for a “sense of belonging” that drives terrorists to
join groups that kill in the name of religion, according to an online lesson
plan for Florida high school students. The world history course on “Invisible
Warfare” — offered by the Florida Virtual
School, the nation’s first statewide Internet-based public high
school — begins by asking students “what comes to mind” when considering the
concept of fundamentalism and then prompts them to think of the term in a
religious context. It later defines terrorism as the act of using fear or
violence to accomplish certain political or religious goals.
“Common traits
that psychologists have found in terrorists are that they are often risk-takers
and many suffer from low self-esteem,” according to the lesson plan, which was
obtained by FoxNews.com. “Sometimes joining a terrorist group provides these
individuals with a sense of belonging.”
Earlier in the
lesson plan, students are asked to consider how “this type of fundamentalism”
has affected Islam and notes that some Islamic fundamentalist groups have
reinterpreted the word jihad, which means “struggle” in Arabic, to mean a “holy
war” against non-Muslims. Some critics including the Global Dispatch claimed
that the transition from Christianity to Islam within the lesson plan “softly
could imply Christianity may be affecting (therefore causing) Muslim
extremism.” “For example, some passages
in the Bible could be used to justify the slaughter of men, women and children
in ways we have difficulty understanding today,” the plan reads. “Would anyone condone this now? How would you
react to someone who insisted that holding these beliefs was fundamental to
Christianity?”
Representatives at
the Florida Virtual School denied those claims, saying the lesson plan does not
suggest a link between fundamentalists within Islam and Christianity. Tania
Clow, a spokeswoman for the Florida Virtual School, told FoxNews.com in a
statement that the purpose of the lesson was to lay foundational knowledge in
order for students to understand the more complex issue of global terrorism and
the impact religious fundamentalism is having globally. “Yes, the Bible is referenced, but only as
an example of how some passages may no longer be compatible with the modern
world, prompting students to think about whether the ideas would be condoned
today,” Clow wrote in an email. “The lesson does not suggest that there is a
link between Islam and Christianity as fundamentalist groups.”
Two key issues are
specifically addressed in the lesson, Clow said, including the impact of
religious fundamentalism in the last half of the 20th century and the impact
and global response to international terrorism.
State-certified
instructors at the online
school are not allowed to change the actual lesson text, but are
encouraged to engage students in thoughtful debate, Clow said.
Not everyone,
however, agrees that the lesson plan as presented is useful for young minds,
including Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, who claimed the
lesson plan unfairly compared fundamentalists within Christianity and Islam. “Fundamentalist Christians pray for people,
they pray for their own members who convert to another religion,” Donohue told
FoxNews.com. “Fundamentalist Muslims will kill you. So, right off the bat, the
equation is pernicious.”
Dr. Keith Ablow, a
psychiatrist and Fox News contributor, said it takes more than low self-esteem
to prompt someone to don a suicide vest in the name of religion. “Much more in the way of psychiatric disorder
is required to create a terrorist than just low self-esteem," Ablow said.
"The real key is a failure of empathy, and while it might be true that
many terrorists have low self-esteem, there are lots of people with low
self-esteem that are either depressed,
homeless, or are in relationships with people that abuse them – but not
terrorists.”
Robert Jones, CEO
of the Public Religion Research Institute, cited a 2011 study that found that
Americans are more willing — by more than a 3-to-1 margin — to separate the
violence of self-professed Christians from Christianity than they are to
separate violent behavior of self-professed Muslims from Islam.
The poll, entitled
““Pluralism, Immigration and Civic Integration Survey,” found that 44 percent
of all Americans believed self-professed Muslims who committed acts of violence
in the name of Islam to truly be Muslims, compared to just 13 percent of those
committed acts of violence in the name of Christianity to truly be Christians.
As a whole, younger Americans and college
graduates are overwhelmingly more likely to believe that Islam -- as practiced
by most Muslims -- does not promote violence, Jones said. “If you ask that question, Americans are
basically divided,” Jones told FoxNews.com. “But education and age is driving a
lot of it.”
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Doing a Texas Two-Step Around Education Reform
Watering down new high-school graduation standards will shortchange students, employers and the country.
By CHARLES COOK AND TERRENCE MOORE
For decades, policy makers have gone back and forth adopting the latest fads in school reform without any measurable improvement in learning. The latest trend in Texas is to de-emphasize the liberal arts and increase instructional time spent in math, science and technology.
As the Texas legislature convened last month, a coalition of anti-testing organizations, including Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment, promoted a plan to gut the state's tough new high-school graduation standards. Instead of passing 15 end-of-course exams, a student would graduate by passing two or three. More than 800 Texas school boards have adopted a resolution to water down requirements.
We disagree. States across the country are increasing graduation standards, and Texas cannot afford to water down its own. A proposal to eliminate exams in world geography and world history as a graduation requirement, for instance, is shortsighted. Ever-lower expectations lead to one predictable outcome: a profound ignorance of the world among young people in an era when international events and evolving fiscal and trade policies have a personal impact on communities, businesses and individuals in every corner of the U.S.
Who hasn't heard or seen the signs of this ignorance? To cite one of many now-familiar results, there is the 2008 report "Still at Risk: What Students Don't Know, Even Now" by Frederick Hess. It found that nearly 25% of 17-year-olds surveyed nationwide could not identify Adolf Hitler. More than 25% believed Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World after 1750. Forty percent could not place World War I as occurring between 1900 and 1950. Nearly 40% could not identify the Renaissance as the period in European history noted for cultural and technological advances.
Allowing young people to graduate as historical or geographical illiterates is myopic for another reason. Training them for getting jobs is not good enough; graduates of public schools are also citizens. Ask any physician today whether politics affects his livelihood.
We have a different approach to equipping students to face the future, one that has the weight of millennia of human experience behind it: a rigorous classical education. Such an education (called liberal-arts at the college level) does not shortchange math and science. On the contrary, those subjects are studied with more rigor than can be seen in today's public schools.
Students also learn the fundamentals of English grammar; American and world history through the reading of primary source documents; and the great stories of human struggle and yearning told by the greatest storytellers—Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and Melville. They study the principles of liberty and self-government as articulated by the Founding Fathers and the ennobling beauties found in painting, sculpture and song. Yes, the children have to learn Latin, too, just as the Founding Fathers did, because that language gives the greatest insight into the vocabulary and grammar of our own tongue and the Romance languages, including Spanish.
Certainly America needs as many engineers and computer scientists as the country requires in the 21st century. But that does not describe what lies ahead for the vast majority of young people entering the marketplace. The most common complaints of American employers is that job applicant and recent hires lack communication skills and higher-level thinking skills. More plainly, many applicants cannot read a memo, they cannot express themselves in speech or in writing, they lack the ability to think through difficult problems.
We think that students who have been taught to write forcefully by studying Shakespeare and Tom Paine, who have learned to speak by studying the speeches of Cicero and Abraham Lincoln, who have learned to think through difficult problems by studying the Constitution through an analysis of the Federalist Papers, and who revel in the rigors of Latin grammar will have no difficulty in reading the boss's memo.
Training young people in the liberal arts and sciences also will better prepare them to become "the boss" when it is time for the present cohort of bosses to retire. Those on the front lines of hiring employees in this state see the need for a classical education. Now parents are increasingly demanding such an education for their children. We know this in part because the number of schools that have come to Hillsdale College each spring in search of graduating seniors to recruit as teachers of classical subjects has more than doubled in the past five years.
Before long, we will begin to see how well the approach works. Responsive Education Solutions (ResponsiveEd), the largest charter-school system in Texas, in collaboration with Hillsdale College, is providing students the opportunity to receive a rigorous classical education tuition-free. Founders Classical Academy is a public charter school that opened near Dallas in August 2012. The response has been almost overwhelming. The school initially started with 450 students and will educate more than 700 next year.
Classical-curriculum schools in other states, such as Ridgeview Classical Schools in Colorado, generally have waiting lists of over a thousand applicants. The graduates of such programs go on to college to study the liberal arts and sciences. Typically, the biggest complaint of these graduates is that their freshman courses were too easy.
As ResponsiveEd and Hillsdale College continue to open classical schools across the country, we want to see other schools, including noncharter public schools, brought up to a serious level of accountability as well.
Jobs do not create the human mind; the human mind creates jobs. As a result, the very best education—the kind the Founding Fathers had—is what will produce good workers and good citizens. The challenge for those who want to eliminate testing in world history and geography or other subjects in Texas is to explain how students are prepared for a global economy when they are not required to learn anything about either the globe or the economy.
Mr. Cook is CEO of ResponsiveEd, a charter-school district with over 60 schools in Texas. Mr. Moore is a Hillsdale College professor of history who advises the college's Barney Charter School Initiative. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324081704578233814190553202.html
Watering down new high-school graduation standards will shortchange students, employers and the country.
By CHARLES COOK AND TERRENCE MOORE
For decades, policy makers have gone back and forth adopting the latest fads in school reform without any measurable improvement in learning. The latest trend in Texas is to de-emphasize the liberal arts and increase instructional time spent in math, science and technology.
As the Texas legislature convened last month, a coalition of anti-testing organizations, including Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment, promoted a plan to gut the state's tough new high-school graduation standards. Instead of passing 15 end-of-course exams, a student would graduate by passing two or three. More than 800 Texas school boards have adopted a resolution to water down requirements.
We disagree. States across the country are increasing graduation standards, and Texas cannot afford to water down its own. A proposal to eliminate exams in world geography and world history as a graduation requirement, for instance, is shortsighted. Ever-lower expectations lead to one predictable outcome: a profound ignorance of the world among young people in an era when international events and evolving fiscal and trade policies have a personal impact on communities, businesses and individuals in every corner of the U.S.
Who hasn't heard or seen the signs of this ignorance? To cite one of many now-familiar results, there is the 2008 report "Still at Risk: What Students Don't Know, Even Now" by Frederick Hess. It found that nearly 25% of 17-year-olds surveyed nationwide could not identify Adolf Hitler. More than 25% believed Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World after 1750. Forty percent could not place World War I as occurring between 1900 and 1950. Nearly 40% could not identify the Renaissance as the period in European history noted for cultural and technological advances.
Allowing young people to graduate as historical or geographical illiterates is myopic for another reason. Training them for getting jobs is not good enough; graduates of public schools are also citizens. Ask any physician today whether politics affects his livelihood.
We have a different approach to equipping students to face the future, one that has the weight of millennia of human experience behind it: a rigorous classical education. Such an education (called liberal-arts at the college level) does not shortchange math and science. On the contrary, those subjects are studied with more rigor than can be seen in today's public schools.
Students also learn the fundamentals of English grammar; American and world history through the reading of primary source documents; and the great stories of human struggle and yearning told by the greatest storytellers—Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and Melville. They study the principles of liberty and self-government as articulated by the Founding Fathers and the ennobling beauties found in painting, sculpture and song. Yes, the children have to learn Latin, too, just as the Founding Fathers did, because that language gives the greatest insight into the vocabulary and grammar of our own tongue and the Romance languages, including Spanish.
Certainly America needs as many engineers and computer scientists as the country requires in the 21st century. But that does not describe what lies ahead for the vast majority of young people entering the marketplace. The most common complaints of American employers is that job applicant and recent hires lack communication skills and higher-level thinking skills. More plainly, many applicants cannot read a memo, they cannot express themselves in speech or in writing, they lack the ability to think through difficult problems.
We think that students who have been taught to write forcefully by studying Shakespeare and Tom Paine, who have learned to speak by studying the speeches of Cicero and Abraham Lincoln, who have learned to think through difficult problems by studying the Constitution through an analysis of the Federalist Papers, and who revel in the rigors of Latin grammar will have no difficulty in reading the boss's memo.
Training young people in the liberal arts and sciences also will better prepare them to become "the boss" when it is time for the present cohort of bosses to retire. Those on the front lines of hiring employees in this state see the need for a classical education. Now parents are increasingly demanding such an education for their children. We know this in part because the number of schools that have come to Hillsdale College each spring in search of graduating seniors to recruit as teachers of classical subjects has more than doubled in the past five years.
Before long, we will begin to see how well the approach works. Responsive Education Solutions (ResponsiveEd), the largest charter-school system in Texas, in collaboration with Hillsdale College, is providing students the opportunity to receive a rigorous classical education tuition-free. Founders Classical Academy is a public charter school that opened near Dallas in August 2012. The response has been almost overwhelming. The school initially started with 450 students and will educate more than 700 next year.
Classical-curriculum schools in other states, such as Ridgeview Classical Schools in Colorado, generally have waiting lists of over a thousand applicants. The graduates of such programs go on to college to study the liberal arts and sciences. Typically, the biggest complaint of these graduates is that their freshman courses were too easy.
As ResponsiveEd and Hillsdale College continue to open classical schools across the country, we want to see other schools, including noncharter public schools, brought up to a serious level of accountability as well.
Jobs do not create the human mind; the human mind creates jobs. As a result, the very best education—the kind the Founding Fathers had—is what will produce good workers and good citizens. The challenge for those who want to eliminate testing in world history and geography or other subjects in Texas is to explain how students are prepared for a global economy when they are not required to learn anything about either the globe or the economy.
Mr. Cook is CEO of ResponsiveEd, a charter-school district with over 60 schools in Texas. Mr. Moore is a Hillsdale College professor of history who advises the college's Barney Charter School Initiative. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324081704578233814190553202.html
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