Developing Educational Standards

Developing Educational Standards - Florida

Florida

Developing Educational Standards is maintained by Charles Hill and the Wappingers Central School District in New York. Your help with updates or corrections is greatly appreciated. [This page was last updated on December 20, 2001]

DES Index page
DES list of State Education Departments

By Governmental Agency | By Organization |

Florida Department of Education
The Sunshine State Standards portion of the Florida Department of Education's site contains the standards in Adobe Acrobat format, along with links to course descriptions for grades 6 through high school and to downloadable "Curriculum Planning Tools" that contain both the standards and the course descriptions. Florida adopted its standards in 1996 in preK-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12 configurations. It later added grade level expectations in the four core subject areas, intending to use those from grades 3-10 to drive upcoming state assessments in ELA and math (and, possibly later, science and social studies).
National Assessment of Educational Progress
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, operated by the US Department of Education, bills itself as The Nation's Report Card. While not explicitly tied to particular national or state standards, its reports provide a way of looking at student progress across the country in the eight subject areas the NAEP covers. These are the arts, civics, geography, math, reading, science, US history, and writing. Each subject has its own page that contains findings from related assessments, answers to basic questions about assessment, and standards and frameworks links. The NAEP site contains the following results (and the year last administered): the arts (1997), civics (1998), geography (1994; the 2001 results are being analyzed), math (2000), reading (2000), science (1996;the 2000 results are due in the fall of 2001), US history (1994; the 2001 results are being analyzed), and writing (1998).
National Education Goals Panel
The National Education Goals Panel was set up to monitor progress towards achieving America's Education Goals. Using its Interactive Data Center, you can see how your state is doing, compare a state to the nation, or set up state-to-state comparisons. The site also has a Standards and Assessments publications page with free ordering instructions and download links for quite a few documents. In addition, you can sign up to receive weekly and monthly email updates of what the panel sees as progress toward achieving the national goals.
US Department of Education
The US Department of Education has its own search site that allows you to search the department, any of its agency web sites. It also maintains a searchable set of research summaries of ERIC Digests from 1992 to the present. Typing in the word "standards" turns up documents about such topics as social studies, the public perception of standards, and standardized tests.

By Organization | By Governmental Agency |

American Federation of Teachers
The AFT's web site pages has several major sections devoted to standards. Academic Standards contains links to various AFT documents and newspaper colums about standards, including the November 1999 version of the AFT's Making Standards Matter. Like its predecessors, this report stakes a position about what it is that standards ought to be like and assesses the quality of each state's standards and frameworks. A second AFT page has information about the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, including an AFT policy brief along with quides and other information about the NBPT. Lastly, the AFT has published several Adobe Acrobat versions of documents about both teaching and content standards that are available on a Policy Briefs page.
Center for Education Reform
The Center for Education Reform, founded in 1993, conducts research and publishes studies and advocacy pieces dealing with such prominent educational issues as charter schools and standards. Its section on Academic Standards and Curriculum offers a page with links to the "Report Cards" issued by many states, a page of frequently asked questions about standards, and links to various articles and books on related topics. The center also hosts the Education Leaders Council.
Council for Basic Education
The Council for Basic Education's has played a major role in reviewing, analyzing, and developing a number of standards-focused projects. Described in more detail on CBE's Policy, Standards, and Instruction site, these have included such current projects as math frameworks for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, studies of core subject area standards for Nevada, a review of the Sunshine State Standards in Florida, and the development of school district standards in Maryland and Ohio. Past projects have included partnerships with various foundations and publications; reviews of state standards for Alaska, California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Virginia; and school district reviews in California, Illinois Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, and Wisconsin. In addition, CBE has worked with ASCD to compile state standards in Standards for Excellence in Education and with the Johnson Foundation to sponsor several Wingspread conferences on standards, assessment, and instructional practice (the conference proceedings are on line in Adobe Acrobat format). Finally, the CBE site offers several documents that help explain what the standards movement is all about.
Council of Chief State School Officers
The Council of Chief State School Officers' site offers resources on a wide range of educational issues. Those directly relevant to standards and frameworks are grouped on a Standards and Assessments page. They include surveys of state progress on standards and examples of standards and benchmarks in math and science. They also have articles dealing with standards for teachers and school leaders. Publications in 2001 include a guide to aligning state standards and assessments, a survey of state policies regarding standards and assessments, an examination of ways to analyze classroom application of curriculum standards, and standards for teachers of special education students.
Education Commission of the States
The Education Issues selection on the Education Commission of the States home page leads to information on a number of different topics, one of which is standards. Selecting "standards" leads to a page with updates on the progress of standards action and legislation in about 15 different states (the number should grow as the ECS database grows), a set of "Quick Facts," and links to various research documents.
Education Week
Education Week (along with its sister publication, Teacher Magazine) offers selected articles, an archive, and a particularly impressive section called Issues that contains links to pages with articles dedicated to all the major current educational issues including assessment and standards. In addition, Education Week has published special reports about standards, frameworks, assessments, and their associated travails. Highlights of its online holdings include a special January 1999 issue, Quality Counts, that reviews and draws conclusions about the status of current educational programs, including standards initiatives; a 1997 version of this study; and a Fall 1998 series of articles called Applying Standards about various reviews of state and national standards. (Education Week also did a story on the Putnam Valley Schools and the web site you are currently using in its March 20, 1996 issue called Web Site on K-12 Standards Efforts Lauded).
Eisenhower National Clearinghouse (Florida)
The Eisenhower National Clearinghouse has placed Science For All Students - The Florida Pre K-12 Science Curriculum Framework (1993) on line. This link takes you to an introductory page. If you want to see the relevant framework, go to the bottom of the page and click on the table of contents button located there.
FairTest
FairTest, an advocacy group that opposes "the abuses, misues and flaws" of standardized tests, offers a survey of state assessment systems for purchase and for online use. Its web site also has a large amount of information about tests and testing throughout the country.
Florida Gulf Coast University School of Education
Florida Gulf Coast University School of Education has set up a SunshineStateStandards.net with links to the sunshine standards for language arts, science, social studies, math, foreign language, the arts, health, and physical education. Clicking on a link takes you to a page with that subject's standards along with clickable links to benchmarks for grades pre-K to 2, 3-5, 6-9, and 10-12. Some of the benchmarks have links to relevant lesson plans.
National Dropout Prevention Center
The National Dropout Prevention Center, operating out of Clemson University and with funding from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, has set up a Middle School Standards, Assessment, and Interventions site that reports its research on possible relationships between the implementation of academic standards in selected states and urban areas and the performance of at-risk students. The states are Kentucky, Nevada, New Mexico,North Carolina, and Pennsylvania while the school districts are in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Broward County, Florida; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Clark County, Nevada; and Jefferson County, Kentucky. (Thanks to Undine McEvoy, Graduate Assistant at the National Dropout Prevention Center, for this information.)
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation sponsors studies and programs that advance its mission to advance educational standards and create a core curriculum. Among the many reports and resources listed on its Standards, Testing and Accountability page are a January 2000 report on The State of State Standards 2000, edited by Chester Finn. A large document, it assesses standards by subject area (English, history, geography, math, and science) and by state. It concludes that standards have improved slighltly from an assessment made in 1997 but that they are still relatively poor. A second report concludes that the best standards come from California (English, history, science, math), Colorado (geography), and Massachusetts (English). The site has many other articles amd reports.

Top of the Page | DES Index