Jacksonville schools show big improvements (Englewood, Lee: best schools, college, bars)

[fsu813]

When the new, more stringent grading system was put in place for schools in the state of Florida, most thought Jacksonville schools ratings would suffer.

Duval only district in state to increase "A"schools and decrease "F" Schools - Jacksonville Public Education | Examiner.com

While some school ratings have dropped, more have either stayed the same or improved.

Just yesterday, 3 high schools that have been low rated for some time had their ratings released: again, a very pleasant surprise.

Duval County Public Schools high school grades show improvment, 2 schools receive first A's | firstcoastnews.com

Now, Jacksonville has 12 "A" or "B" rated high schools.

A. Philip Randolph and Frank H. Peterson Academies of Technologies
Andrew Jackson
Atlantic Coast
Darnell-Cookman Middle/High School
Douglas Anderson School of the Arts
Englewood
Jean Ribault High School
Mandarin
Paxon School for advanced Studies
Sandalwood
Stanton College Preparatory School

Nice.

[fsquid]

very, I advise all newcomers to choose Duval

[JBtwinz]

That's good news, hopefully Duval can go from 50th out of 67 districts to maybe 35th with a little work in a few years.

Definitely a plus to have several magnets in the district. Complete Florida school district rankings below:

https://app2.fldoe.org/Ranking/Districts/

[Robyn55]

The problem with these scores is a lot of weight is given for improvement (from the absolute bottom of the heap to near the bottom of the heap) as opposed to actual achievement. I think that anyone who has children should take a serious look into how these scores are compiled for schools in the areas they might be considering. Robyn

[fsu813]

Agreed.

For example, the rating for Robert E Lee Highschool has jumped all around over the past 10 years or so. From good to bad and back to good again.

Has anything really changed? No, not especially.

If you and your child make academics a priority, there are VERY few schools that they will not succeed in. All poorly rated schools produce many scholarship-earning students every year, and all highly rated schools produce students that never amount to anything.

[Nomad58]

Originally Posted by JBtwinz

That's good news, hopefully Duval can go from 50th out of 67 districts to maybe 35th with a little work in a few years.

Definitely a plus to have several magnets in the district. Complete Florida school district rankings below:

https://app2.fldoe.org/Ranking/Districts/

Talk about being graded on the curve. Based on this chart, you would think that Florida has the best schools in the Country. (30 A's, 23 B's, 13 C's, and 1 D)

A reminder to everyone, when these results were first released, they showed substantial decreases across the board for all school districts. (Duval and St. Johns included) But, there was such a fuss made about the lower scores, that the power that be decided to throw out the original grades, and come up with a new system that added a full grade to the rankings.

What happened was the all teachers have had the FCAT test questions for the past several years. With those questions in hand, they spent the entire school year leading up the the FCAT tests, literally spoon feeding the correct answers, to the students.

Obviously, that meant that the test scores weren't really indicative of the students knowledge.

So this year the FCAT guys decided the change up the questions, and not give the teachers a preview of the new questions. Result? Big test score drops across the board.

Call me a pessimist, but if you ask me, these revised scores are just an example of self delusion.

As for magnet schools, they do nothing to help the overall school districts. In fact, they have just the opposite result. They steal all the best students, with the most involved parents, from all the other surrounding public schools. This completely fubars the schools that aren't magnets. End result is the you artificially create 2-3 A graded magnet schools, while screwing the remaining 20 schools.