How Vitti’s grade excuses aren’t good enough.

First let me say I think the way Florida does school grades is ridiculous and all they really show you are zip codes as schools in high poverty areas for the most part do worse than the schools that aren’t.

From the Tampa Times: - 260 Florida elementary schools on the lowest performing 300 list for reading performance had free/reduced meal eligibility rates of 70% or more

http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/florida-school-grades-by-the-numbers/2188130

When you look how Duval did under whelming comes to mind, yes we did have more A schools but our amount of F schools doubled and did anybody else notice how the district said, but six of those were charter schools? More on that later.

Vitti attributed the at best tepid results to large leadership and curriculum changes and ever the spin master said, they would better set us up for the future. I can see what he is saying and its reasonable but at the same time it’s not good enough.

You see nobody listens to the teacher who had a dozen kids miss 25 days or more. Nobody takes into account the teacher forced to deal with discipline problem after discipline problem where they receive little back up. Nobody takes time to think about the teacher who is working for their third principal in four years, who has to buy basic supplies and whose kids arrive well below where they should be. Nope they say those test scores better be up or you will be out. So why should the public listen to Vitti?

Am I saying it’s time to throw Vitti under the bus and cut ties? No, though I do think he has made several errors and squandered a lot of the good will he arrived with, but at the same time I think it’s time we stopped blaming teachers for not being over to overcome all the obstacles they face and thank them for the ones they do because I shudder to think where their students would be without them.