Charlie Crist, aka Obama Huggin' Weasel, may veto the bill.
Fire them all and replace them. This is unacceptable, “WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN”!
Fire them all. It can’t be that hard to find people who would willing to do the work in this economy.
People are striking in this economy?
Good luck finding replacement teachers for Miami-Dade.
How’s your school?
It should take them about ten seconds to replace these teachers; there are laid off teachers from coast to coast these days.
Close all public schools...yes; we can!
Firing union teachers is RACIST!
The teachers (union) doesn’t like the fact that performance is tied to their compensation. The bill isn’t perfect but its certainly a step in the right direction.
Crist will most likely veto the bill though. He’s having a hissy fit with the Florida GOP because they won’t just give him the senate ticket.
Better yet, shut the schools down and rent the buildings to someone who wants to run a real school.
Coming soon to a medical provider near you ...
Isn’t government wonderful?
>> The Florida legislature has passed a bill to get rid of TENURE
Good.
Time for these teachers to grow up and accept the benefits and consequences of the marketplace like most every other working adult.
No Dentist Left Behind
My dentist is great! He sends me reminders so I don't forget Check-ups. He uses the latest techniques based on research. He never hurts me, and I've got all my teeth. When I ran into him the other day, I was eager to see if he'd heard about the new state program. I knew he'd think it was great.
"Did you hear about the new state program to measure effectiveness of dentists with their young patients?" I said. "No," he said. He didn't seem too thrilled. "How will they do that?" "It's quite simple," I said. "They will just count the number of cavities each patient has at age 10, 14, and 18 and average that to determine a dentist's rating. Dentists will be rated as excellent, good, average, below average, and unsatisfactory. That way parents will know which are the best dentists. The plan will also encourage the less effective dentists to get better," I said. "Poor dentists who don't improve could lose their licenses to practice."
"That's terrible," he said. "What? That's not a good attitude," I said. "Don't you think we should try to improve children's dental health in this state?" "Sure I do," he said, "but that's not a fair way to determine who is practicing good dentistry." "Why not? I said. "It makes perfect sense to me."
"Well, it's so obvious," he said. "Don't you see that dentists don't all work with the same clientele, and that much depends on things we can't control? For example, I work in a rural area with a high percentage of patients from deprived homes, while some of my colleagues work in upper middle- class neighborhoods. Many of the parents I work with don't bring their children to see me until there is some kind of problem, and I don't get to do much preventive work. Also, more educated parents who understand the relationship between sugar and decay. To top it all off, so many of my clients have well water, which is untreated and has no fluoride in it. Do you have any idea how much difference early use of fluoride can make?"
"It sounds like you're making excuses," I said. "I can't believe that you, my dentist, would be so defensive. After all, you do a great job, and you needn't fear a little accountability."
"I am not being defensive!" he said. "My best patients are as good as anyone's, my work is as good as anyone's, but my average cavity count is going to be higher than a lot of other dentists because I chose to work where I am needed most."
"Don't get touchy," I said. "Touchy?" he said. His face had turned red, and from the way he was clenching and unclenching his jaws, I was afraid he was going to damage his teeth. "Try furious! In a system like this, I will end up being rated average, below average, or worse. The few educated patients I have who see these ratings may believe this so-called rating is an actual measure of my ability and proficiency as a dentist. They may leave me, and I'll be left with only the most needy patients. And my cavity average score will get even worse. On top of that, how will I attract good dental hygienists and other excellent dentists to my practice if it is labeled below average?"
"I think you are overreacting," I said. "'Complaining, excuse- making and stonewalling won't improve dental health'...I am quoting from a leading member of the DOC," I noted. "What's the DOC?" he asked. "It's the Dental Oversight Committee," I said, "a group made up of mostly lay persons to make sure dentistry in this state gets improved. "Spare me," he said, "I can't believe this. Reasonable people won't buy it," he said hopefully.
The program sounded reasonable to me, so I asked, "How else would you measure good dentistry?" "Come watch me work," he said. "Observe my processes." "That's too complicated, expensive and time- consuming," I said. "Cavities re the bottom line, and you can't argue with the bottom line. It's an absolute measure." "That's what I'm afraid my parents and prospective patients will think. This can't be happening," he said despairingly.
"Now, now," I said, "don't despair. The state will help you some." "How?" he asked. "If you receive a poor rating, they'll send a dentist who is rated excellent to help straighten you out," I said brightly. "You mean," he said, "they'll send a dentist with a wealthy clientele to show me how to work on severe juvenile dental problems with which I have probably had much more experience? BIG HELP!"
"There you go again," I said. "You aren't acting professionally at all." "You don't get it," he said. "Doing this would be like grading schools and teachers on an average score made on a test of children's progress with no regard to influences outside the school, the home, the community served and stuff like that. Why would they do something so unfair to dentists? No one would ever think of doing that to schools."
I just shook my head sadly, but he had brightened. "I'm going to write my representatives and senators," he said. "I'll use the school analogy. Surely they will see the point." He walked off with that look of hope mixed with fear and suppressed anger that I, a teacher, see in the mirror so often lately.
If you don't understand why educators resent the recent federal NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT, [and pay for performance] this may help. If you do understand, you'll enjoy this analogy, which was forwarded by John S. Taylor, Superintendent of Schools for the Lancaster County, PA, School District.
JFK did admit in a speech that lowering tax rates (suprisingly)
led to an increase in total tax revenues.
Then he also (IIRC) signed an executive order allowing Federal
employees to be unionized.
Talk about contraditions embodied in one person!
Too bad more public officials/administrators won’t take the route of
Ronald Reagan (and even Detroit mayor Bing, and a Democrat at that)
and tell public employees that go on strike...
“YOU’RE FIRED!!!!!”
I suspect Donald Trump would love to deliver the message for
for the government.
“Charlie Crist, aka Obama Huggin’ Weasel, may veto the bill. “
Drudge has a headline up that reads: Rubio 57%, Crist 28%.
20 some years ago, Florida Legislation created the "School Advisory Councils" to run schools locally by parents, community businesses and members, students, and school teachers and staff (not just the principals). Their task was to write the annual "School Improvement Plan" (SIP) - a living, changing document that describes the school locally (as a local, small entity versus the BIG incomprehensible system) AND the school budget.
The SIP was to make annual adjustments to the curricular and cultural (safety, etc) components of the school by the local experts (named above).
The budget was to be developed to enact the SIP.
The task of educating the children of our community was to be shared between all stakeholders. School Advisory Councils (SACs) were the instrument by which “the whole village” was “to raise the child.”
Current legislation proposed by Florida Senator Thrasher (SB 6) and passed by the Florida Senate last Wednesday and embodied in HB7189 essentially isolates the teachers and principals of schools as the primary parties responsible for a child’s education.
SB 6/HB7189's ridiculous implication is that the parents, community, and students themselves identified in the earlier legislation establishing SACs have little to do with a child's progress.
SB6/HB7189 suggests that if teacher and principal salaries are threatened, teachers will somehow find a magic bullet that parents, teachers and administrators together have not been able to find.
By threatening to raise the taxes of the individual communities who resist this legislation, the Senators avoid blame for the consequences of this radical change, shifting their blame to the individual School Boards. The Senate bill essentially holds a loaded economic gun to the heads of our communities – “Do this, or pay.”
SB 6/HB7189 is an admission of the failure of both the state and the local school districts for making much of the provision for the SACs that would have, could have, turned schools around.
Perhaps the school districts were as mum as the law would allow them to be for reluctance of giving up central control of the schools. Poorly advertised – SACs are poorly attended and SIP's are no more than statistical tables of FCAT data only an actuary could appreciate.
SB 6/HB7189 is an admission of our failure as community members and parents for not showing up at the SAC meetings that, in spite of this poor advertisement, still convened.
Teachers and students have been left to themselves to teach/learn the burgeoning body of information, skills and values necessary to become a functional part of society.
Rather than participate in this process, society has gone so far as to undermine it by providing children with sundry digital toys and virtual reality escape vehicles – video games, internet access, hundreds of cable channels, iPods and cell phones - to both appease the adults' guilty conscience for neglecting children and of necessity - to babysit their children.
Institutional education won't "work" with clients that are so preoccupied that they will not study or discipline themselves - outside the classroom and now even in the classroom.
Lawmakers either do not understand the breakdown that I have described above or don't want to address it.
SB 6/HB7189 fails to address the problem.
Rather than bring attention back to the community as the SAC legislation did, back to the failure of our communities to prepare and present students ready for education on a DAILY basis - a failure that has produced the reality of distracted, unmotivated, defiant, truant, disrespectful and disruptive students - SB 6/HB7189 ignores the many factors that interfere with a teacher’s ability to instruct, assess, and assign appropriate grades.
In a tight economic climate and system where votes are bought by services provided, institutional education suffering from such socially rooted and complex problems is a losing proposition.
It is being systematically deconstructed and reassigned to private vendors to shift responsibility away from the government.
In Florida , this is facilitated by the fact that we have a majority conservative legislation whose leaning toward privatization is congruent with this effort.
Make no mistake, this bill, SB 6/HB7189, will no more fix public education than telling a drowning man to swim will save him.
What SB 6/HB7189 will do is first drive talented and in-demand teachers to other venues for their livelihood. Second, it will further villainize children who are rejecting as irrelevant the narrow curriculum and 1 dimensional assessments that are being tightened like nooses around the children’s and educator’s necks. We have already seen this happen with the implementation of FCAT – rather than addressing the issues that cause students to disengage, we find it more convenient to label them as criminals and to exit them from the classroom to the halls and from the school building to the streets.
The economic forces SB 6/HB7189 will impose will redefine “good” and “bad” in terms of success at testing. Any student who threatens the economic status of an educator will be exited from the system.
Our criminal population will swell.
The solution to our students’ rejection of institutional education is not SB 6/HB7189. SB 6/HB7189 needs to be vetoed this week by the Governorbefore irrevocable harm is done to the already strained local schools.
The real issues of student learning as affected by all segments of the local community must be addressed – and this through the vehicle that decades of legislation has established but that practice has ignored – the School Advisory Councils. The answer lies in convening town hall meetings on the small scale at each local school’s School Advisory Council. The answer is in you and I waking up tomorrow morning and saying “I’m going to make my community’s school a safe and healthy learning environment.” Then attending the next SAC meeting…and the next…
SB 6/HB7189 merely does what we in our communities have done for too long – shift the blame to others. Here it shifts it further from the community to solely the educators.
These are our children and they can learn, if we will not only encourage them to, but hand in hand with our neighbors, provide for them and require them to respectfully attend school, go to class, listen and participate, then return to loving and secure homes to study.