The State Board of Education is slated to adopt its five-year strategic plan this morning, a “road map for Florida’s education community that shows where we are, where we want to be, and how we will get there.”
Among the goals: Expanding school choice, so that by the 2017-18 school year the number of students attending charter schools or using taxpayer-funded scholarships to attend private schools would jump considerably.
The board’s proposal calls for the number of students enrolling in charter schools to double — with the number of charter schools expanding from 518 to 829 — while the number taking part in the Tax Credit Scholarship program would jump 2.5 times.
If these gains come to be, they’d represent a significant expansion in the school choice movement in a state that already prides itself on giving parents “the freedom to choose the educational path that is right for their child.” They’d likely also open the door wider to critics who view these options outside traditional schools as unproven, driven by private, profit-making companies and/or undermining public education.
The board is also slated to adopt new, and specific, academic targets for Florida students — by race. These targets are part of the waiver the state received from the federal government, freeing it from many of the requirements of the No Child Left Behind law.
Florida’s targets were not part of the state’s initial waiver application. Officials said that document referenced them, but the targets could not be calculated until new FCAT 2.0 data was analyzed. Now that the data is in and has been crunched, the State Board can adopt new goals for student performance.
These goals note how students in different racial groups performed this year and then set targets they are to hit in the next five years. Seventy nine percent of Asian students, for example, read at grade level or better this year. By 2017, 88 percent of them should.
The 2017 goal for white students is 85 percent while its 77 percent for Hispanics and 69 percent for black students.
Similar race-based targets in Virginia and Washington, D.C. have prompted criticism, with some saying that lower targets for some students — black kids and low-income youngsters, for example — suggested lower expectations.
But others argued the different targets weren’t mean to set lower expectations but to acknowledge the current situation and that create a blueprint to narrow the performance gap between groups — and help those who are behind catch up.
Florida students with lower targets — poor children, those learning English and those with disabilities are among them — perform poorly on FCAT compared to the state as a whole.
The targets are part of an overall goal to improve student performance, from ”readiness” for kindergarten to high school graduation.
The board is meeting at Valencia College this morning.
