Reviewing the year in education statewide does not necessarily align with the year in education in South Florida.
Florida’s ban of the AP African American Studies course, book bans around the state, and the more rigorous state academic standards impact every public school. But speaking to the superintendents of Miami-Dade County Public Schools and Broward County Public Schools, different issues took center stage in their districts.
Let’s start with Miami-Dade earning an “A” grade for the fourth year in a row.
“Making sure the students are proficient academically, making sure that their social-emotional side, their mental health was a priority for us, was important and so that is what I remember of 2023,” said Miami-Dade superintendent Dr. Jose Dotres.
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Broward County Public Schools hired a new superintendent, Dr. Peter Licata.
“It’s been five and half months, and some days it feels longer, most days it feels like it was yesterday,” Licata said.
His focus, Licata told us Friday, is primarily on raising Broward’s district grade from a “B” to an “A”.
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“We want to make sure that we are addressing the targeted specific schools, we know some of the schools may have dropped a little bit,” Licata said.
Dotres said to keep his district’s A-train rolling, they still have to overcome issues caused by the pandemic.
“We no longer talk about remediation, or doing remediation strategies with students but rather accelerating because that’s what we have to do,” Dotres said. “A hundred percent, that’s a result of the pandemic but let’s call it behavior, behavior of staying at home, not having the tools, not having the immediate support of a teacher.”
Licata also mentioned discipline issues.
“Currently we’re looking at 80% of our arrests are with 40% of our student population, which are African Americans, that’s gotta come down, that’s a disparity that I’m embarrassed by,” Licata said.
Each school district dealt with culture war issues, from the fallout over a transgender girl playing sports in Broward to Amanda Gorman’s poem being targeted and ultimately moved to a higher grade level in Miami-Dade.
“Education’s become the epicenter of some forums, politically, and we have to make sure we hear the noise but we don’t have to listen to it all the time, we ought to make sure we stay in the middle and figure out what’s best for kids,” Licata said.
“Narratives become big, they become entangled, they become big stories, but yet what’s really happening in the schools, that’s not what it’s about,” said Dotres, emphasizing again that the focus is always on student progress.
“We’re gonna get back to talking about kids and education more and more because that’s really why we do this job,” Licata added.
Licata also said one of his big challenges in 2024 will be right-sizing the school district, because Broward County Public Schools currently has 60,000 empty seats. Dotres said looking ahead to next year, learning how to harness the power of artificial intelligence in the classroom will be crucial.
