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Pre-release Beta: Tell us how to improve the Dashboard and its website.
Negative treatment by the Seminole County School Board led parents to analyze school FCAT data and uncover two surprising issues: The more years students spend in Seminole schools the more students fall behind, and depressingly slow improvement at middle school and high school levels.
Parents then asked if this is a local issue or larger. Unexpectedly, parallel performance issues were discovered throughout Florida. This was turned into a Florida Education Dashboard to present Florida's data clearly. The pattern of data lead to recommendations for a clearer way to report educational scores than the current school scoring system.
In Seminole County parents are starting to believe that their school board does not know how to improve the quality of education at middle school and high school levels. To raise individual school scores Seminole's school board appears to be using the "FCAT Shuffle," busing students to distant schools to manipulate school test populations and hide what may be educational issues with the 40% of its students who appear to fall below grade level in reading.
To defend itself the Seminole school board repeatedly claims high school grades. But if the educational data is true, the Seminole school board is concealing average and needy students' educational declines, damaging their entire lives while the school board claims victory and moves on. This feeds the worst stereotypes of politicians at a time when leadership is needed more than ever.
Could this be true? This site recommends a clearer way to report education data so these data are surfaced instead of concealed, access to data within schools increases, and more children receive educational progress from more years spent in school (instead of an aparent decline).
Instead of being ignored or pacified with sham public involvement, parents and communities who try to help improve education should be welcomed. It's increasingly clear that Seminole's schools (and perhaps Florida's) can't turn this around by themselves and need broad community initiatives -- many of which will come from the community and won't be controlled by the school system.
The Florida Education Dashboard is one example of what's possible from a data-savvy, forward looking citizenry in a networked society. The future of our children, cities and Florida might be revealed by whether educators and politicians welcome or oppose this attempt to advance educational reporting.
Restore Trust, LLC, its education analyses and publications are a small side activity -- we have active family lives and jobs. Our goal is a good quality of life for our children and local neighbors, while contributing to the future of many kids and communities.
First: Please see if you can answer your question without contacting us. If your question relates to the data or Dashboard, consider spending a few minutes doing this walkthrough.
Second: If that is not sufficient, please send communications to restoretrust@seminolecountyeducation.com.
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Copyright 2006 by Restore Trust, LLC. Restore Trust, LLC is a private corporation set up to own and publish research and communications on education.