Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test

The notice in the mail told Carmen Olmeda she could transfer her profoundly disabled daughter out of Orange County's F-rated Magnolia School. But there is no other county school that can meet the needs of 18-year-old Loly, who needs hourly glucose...

Florida plans to retire most FCAT exams and replace them with new tests aligned to the new Common Core standards. The switch, set for the 2014-15 school year, has been in the works since at least 2010 -- but now just what tests the state will switch to...

In his five months as Florida education commissioner, no moss has grown under Tony Bennett. He has barnstormed the Sunshine State glad-handing teachers skeptical over merit pay and selling Common Core to increasingly cynical critics who view the...

The effort to hammer out new, statewide rules for how to use value-added test score data in teacher evaluations will take longer than planned. That is not surprising, the Florida Department of Education said, as officials knew that the Legislature could...

LEESBURG — In a room dubbed Confidence City, a burly Baptist minister-turned-educator calls out writing instructions to a row of special-needs teenagers hunched over their work sheets. Derrick King Sr., a part-time 40-year-old pastor with a...

Last month, I wrote about some of the nonsensical testing scenarios for kids with profound disabilities. ("Florida's test-obsessed style of education hits disabled families hard.") And people responded in spades -- parents, teachers, families of...

Former Jones High School Teacher of the Year Hugh Broomes has been fired after a district investigation found he had sex with a student. He was fired April 23 after a district investigation found he was texting the student, a minor, on her cellphone...

You don't always need colored hair, tattoos or a wild personality to be a rock star. At Silver Shores Elementary in Miramar, being just over 4-feet tall, 10 years old and wearing a pink tutu will do. "Rock stars, they can be people just like us,...

A Florida high school diploma is once again being rewarded to all students who can pass the algebra end-of-course exam (ninth grade math) and the 10th grade FCAT exam in reading. Thank you, Gov. Rick Scott, for once again changing the requirements back to...

Gov. Rick Scott praised Florida's public-school teachers Tuesday during a visit to Ocoee Middle School, one of five stops on his weeklong "victory tour" to celebrate teacher raises. "We've got great teachers in our state, and we should be very thankful,"...