Tag: florida model
The consent of the tested and punished, part 2: the Florida Death Purple, the NAEP, and the corrupt brand signals we tolerate from our government
You can find part 1 of this series at the bottom of this essay. This quote below comes from the final paragraph of FSU Physics Professor Paul Cottle’s latest installment in our ongoing dialogue. In this case, my usage of “STEM” intended to reference branding, not content. But I didn’t make that clear; because I’m not sure I had fully…
Kelli Stargel’s true colors: “I do not plan to be there” on April 24 when the School Board votes on the Stargel School Kill List
Take a look at this video I took of Sen. Kelli Stargel on Tuesday. Here’s the context for it. At our April 24th meeting, your School Board will address Stargel’s legislative mandate to choose a method for punishing and harming the people who attend and work at six Polk schools. These schools have been singled out because they are not…
Sheriff Judd seems to misunderstand his own law. So let’s start over, as serious and collaborative people.
The “School Security” law your legislators and Polk Sheriff Grady Judd recently produced swallows itself in fundamental and lethal contradiction. Ideally, all stakeholders would recognize this and simply start over again. Ideally, this time, lawmakers and Judd would seek good faith collaboration with subject matter experts in school operations. But we don’t live in an ideally governed state. Thus, it’s…
This. is. our. public. school. system. Celebrating the overwhelming success and crucial lesson of the Starbucks Rebellion.
Today is Super Bowl Sunday. Whether you like football or not, are mad at the players or not, it’s a sort of quasi-national holiday. For me, it’s also become a Polk County national holiday, a day of celebration and reflection. Two Super Bowl Sundays ago, Wendy Bradshaw and I held an impromptu public meeting at high noon at the Lakeside…
Introducing “Education and the English Language,” a periodic series.
More than any other space in American public thought and comment, I find “education” beset with corrupt, unhelpful, or dishonest uses of language. Start with the word itself. We can come much closer as a society to defining with clarity the concept of “war,” for all its euphemisms, than we can the concept of “education.” War essentially means killing people…
The Florida model is DEAD. Here’s how we breathe life into something NEW.
Florida claims to be obsessed with data in education. That’s a lie, of course. The Jeb model has never actually cared about data on its own terms and in good faith. It has always seen data as a manipulatable political weapon to use against teachers and the very idea of egalitarian public education. The behavior of our educrat leaders demonstrates…
Join the 7069 lawsuit, part 3: a sociopathic model breeds sociopathic behavior. You can’t reason with it.
Let’s take a visceral human tour of what Florida’s sociopathic education model looks like in real life for real people — children and adults alike. We’ll start at the end, with these three marvelous young women from Stambaugh Middle School, a traditional zoned middle school in Auburndale. This video is short. Watch it. Here’s the background: some time in the…
A Lake Wales Vision, part 2: choice liberated from the fraudulent Florida model
Here is the link to Part 1: The Future of Lake Wales is in Lake Wales, not Jefferson County. What follows is part 2. ——————————————————————————————————————- Lake Wales fascinates, excites, and frustrates me for the same reason. All the pieces exist there, right now, for an entirely new, community-based model of education with something for just about everyone. This model could equitably and…
There is no “we” with Kelli Stargel. Only “you.”
Update: Senator Stargel posted a Facebook comment in response to this post. I’m republishing it here: “I hate to add to this post because I don’t want to start an extended conversation on Facebook, that at this busy time of session, I don’t have time to complete but…. Billy, I believe we had a free and open conversation. There is…