Identifying Florida’s Best Public School Teachers Based on Student Growth
Welcome to the parent search page, from this page you can search all the public schools in Florida, including charter schools, and see teachers in Math and English/ Language Arts/Reading who are in the statewide top 30% based on the how their students have have increased in knowledge. Some schools will have almost all of their teachers in the top 30% and some schools will not have any listed. Don’t forget that teachers often move, so sometimes searching for a teacher by name may identify a teacher that is not listed in the school you think they currently teach at. On our home page we explain more fully the scope of the database and why a teacher might not be listed.
Why would parents want to identify top teachers? Well, we all want our children to have the best opportunity to develop to their fullest potential, and having an excellent effective teacher is a must for that purpose. Yet, school districts rarely take real steps to retain or recruit the best teachers, and the best and worst teacher in a school is usually paid the same amount. Districts will only focus on attracting and retaining and compensating the best teachers for your children when parents let it be known that they will demand the best. Let your district know you care.
Additional reasons to identify the best teachers– many teachers also tutor, and particularly if your son or daughter is struggling, you will need the best tutoring help you can afford, so you can use this database to identify potential tutors. I am sure you can come up with many other uses for identifying the best teachers, and we look forward to parents sharing those additional uses with us.
One other thing to keep in mind; because of collective bargaining agreements, most districts will not take the steps needed to recognize and reward excellent effective teachers, but charter schools do not have these same limitations.
Start searching!
This page has a more robust search interface, designed to allow Florida Charter School operators to search all of the teachers in a district and to identify and recruit excellent effective teachers to work at charter schools. One of the greatest competitive advantages Florida charter schools have is that, with a few rare exceptions, they are not constricted in hiring teachers by collective bargaining agreements. After the first few years of teaching, years of experience have minimal impact on how good a teacher is, yet that is how most teachers are paid, even those in Charter schools. Charters need to identify 3-10 year teachers in the regular public schools that are demonstrably the best teachers, and pay them what they are worth based on student results to come teach in your charter. And, don’t forget to take care of the best teachers you already have, 50% of teachers are not teaching after the first 5 years. Do what it takes to encourage your best teachers to stay, and to encourage those not performing as well to move along.If you operate a charter school, you may contact us for a free search login by sending an email using the below request login button.
This search page allows to search an entire district and sort by the topic taught, top 10, 20, and 30 percentiles, years of experience, and school name. Most of the teachers also have contact information listed to help you start recruiting.
Charters, request a login or enter your username and password to start searching!
A few caveats about the database. The years of experience is as reported by districts, and some districts report all years of teaching experience, but others only report years in district, so this number is not always going to be an accurate reflection. Also, teacher addresses are not always updated, so that information is a good starting point but will probably need to be verified. And, as explained on the Home page, some teachers who would otherwise qualify were left out of the database by the DOE because of various claimed statutory exemptions. Also, only teachers who taught in a an evaluated subject in 2017- 2018 are included in the database.
While this database only identifies the high performing teachers, if you are a charter operator, we can help you identify your lowest performing teachers that you may need to replace to see improved student results.
The information on this site is extracted from official data collected and released by the Florida Department of Education. While reasonable steps have been taken to ensure that the information on this site is an accurate reflection of the Public Information provided by the Department, no specific warranty as to the accuracy of the included information is provided: all information should be independently verified, and is accessed at the user’s own risk, and neither this site nor any sponsor warrants the reliability of this information for any specific purpose.
Posted by Daniel Woodring & filed under Uncategorized.
Why Do Americans Stink at Math? – NYTimes.com.
Interesting article that highlights what should be a truism, teachers can only teach what they themselves have learned and understand: weak math teachers equal difficulty with students learning math. Interesting contract with Japanese and American math instruction.
Good afternoon all, wanted to let everyone know that the 2017-18 data is posted and has been live on the website for the past month. Sorry for delay in announcing, just ended up having a very busy October
Well, good news, we finally received from the Florida DOE the 2017 list of High Impact Teachers. There are some teachers who are high impact and whose names were redacted by the DOE before we were given the list, so you might not find yourself on the list even if you received a letter. We… Read more »
Hello, we are receiving a number of requests related to the high impact teacher notification letters sent to teachers around the state. Based on the questions we are receiving, we thought it might be helpful to put up a blog post to answer some frequently asked questions. First, the selection criteria for Florida’s best teachers,… Read more »
The website has now been updated with the new Florida teacher data from the 2016-17 school year. I think that this is the earliest we have ever updated. Enjoy, and support excellent teachers!
Source: The Little-Known Statistician Who Taught Us to Measure Teachers – The New York Times Very Interesting article on the man who created the Value Added Model for evaluating teachers. To fairly evaluate teachers, Mr. Sanders argued, the state needed to calculate an expected growth trajectory for each student in each subject, based on past… Read more »