Lisa Dieker went around the room asking her middle-school students what they did over the weekend. CJ went to see the movie “Here Comes the Boom” with her boyfriend. Ed played in a basketball game and Kevin posted new dance videos to YouTube. “Did you work on any art projects?” Dieker asked Maria, a girl [...]

Somewhere midway through his sophomore year of college at Florida Atlantic University, Christopher Clevenger started to question his aeronautical engineering major. He liked the coursework, and was doing well at it, but when he thought about his job prospects, the future seemed bleak. “It would be me, a computer screen and a phone,” he said. [...]

ORLANDO―Lee-Anne Spalding’s Elementary School Social Studies class at the University of Central Florida (UCF) had spread out over the room in small groups. One group of sophomore college students huddled over a set of poetry books, picking out ones they liked. Others gathered around the white board as Spalding demonstrated how to they could embed [...]

An ongoing argument raging across the country over whether student test score gains are a fair way to gauge a teacher’s skill has hit the courts. In what may be among the first of many lawsuits over the new evaluations—which have been adopted by multiple states—the Florida teachers union is challenging the state’s use of [...]

Florida released preliminary results of its recently revamped teacher evaluations from the 2011-2012 school year Wednesday. There was variation among districts, but statewide more than 2 percent of teachers were rated poorly, compared to less than 1 percent in years prior.

A report to be released Thursday by a national research group on teacher quality suggests the Miami-Dade school district is not doing enough to get rid of underperforming teachers.

In Washington, D.C., one of the first places in the country to use value-added teacher ratings to fire teachers, teacher-union president Nathan Saunders likes to point to the following statistic as proof that the ratings are flawed: Ward 8, one of the poorest areas of the city, has only 5 percent of the teachers defined [...]

At an annual training over the summer, Hialeah Senior High School writing teacher Kathy Pham and her colleagues heard what seemed like basic advice from the United Teachers of Dade: Make sure your principal observes you in the classroom this year. And if you have questions, schedule an appointment. The stakes for teacher evaluations in [...]

At Coral Reef Senior High, calculus teacher Orlando Sarduy understands complicated formulas, and knows he will be graded on how his students perform on tests. But despite his advanced knowledge of math, Sarduy cannot explain the statistics-packed formula behind the grade he’ll get. It is so confusing that even a member of the state committee [...]

MANATEE, Fla.—About 70 percent of Principal Doug DuPouy’s teachers at Orange Ridge/Bullock Elementary School spent an entire year in the classroom without being formally observed by an administrator. Now, that’s changed. Starting this year, DuPouy or Assistant Principal Greg Sanders, will formally observe each teacher in his or her classroom at least once a year, [...]