USF center releases first-ever K-12 report

Posted Oct 4, 2011 by Lindsay Peterson

Updated Oct 4, 2011 at 02:39 PM

USF’s David C. Anchin Center had produced a massive report on the state of education in Florida.

It profiles the school districts across the state with data on everything from student achievement to teacher pay.

Here’s a taste:
- In Hardee County, teachers with a bachelor’s degree start at $31,015.
- Graduation rates in Pinellas, Lee and Citrus counties have gone up, but in Manatee and Glades they’ve gone down.
- Half of all the charter schools in West Central Florida are in Hillsborough County.

You can go here for more, though it costs $555 to get a full report, or $149 per region.

That’s a bargain when you consider the work that went into pulling all this together from half a dozen state and national databases.

“The report is completely user friendly,” Anchin director Bruce Jones told Barbara Melendez, of USF News.

“Rather than have to decipher complex, unwieldy and often confusing spreadsheets that differ from one jurisdiction to the next, anyone who wants to find specific categories of statistics can find them quickly and easily.”

The next step, Jones said, is for Anchin researchers to probe the data, “looking for patterns so that we can identify the top issues to explore further and address with concrete recommendations.”

But in the meantime, you can start probing it yourself, if you’ve got the money.