Governor Crist recently announced the formation of a task force on educational excellence. Their main task seems to be to discuss and improve teacher quality. If you follow education you know that teacher quality or the lack of it has been in the news a lot recently and I get it. Less than half our tenth graders can read at grade level, over a third of our kids don’t graduate on time, many of our students have to take remedial classed in college and businesses report having a hard time finding qualified workers from the pool of recent graduates. I get it, somebody has to be responsible and since teachers are doing the teaching, the light shines on them the brightest.
Governor Crist himself isn’t very impressed with the teacher quality in Florida. On the Educational Excellence web page he wrote:
As Governor, I understand that Florida’s teachers need the necessary resources to prepare our students for success in the classroom and to excel as they enter the workforce. Florida’s Task Force on Educational Excellence will be an important collaboration of education stakeholders who will work diligently towards strengthening teacher effectiveness and along with it, student achievement.
I want to thank the members of Florida’s Task Force on Educational Excellence for your commitment to supporting our students and teachers. By working together to improve the quality of education in Florida’s schools, we are investing in the future success of our great state and our nation.
I am not sure if he does understand teachers need for resources because if he did he wouldn’t have led an administration that so poorly funded education but that’s another story. In his statement above he acknowledges that as a state we’re not preparing many of our children to be successful in college or the workforce and the reason must be a lack teacher effectiveness, if not why create a task force to investigat and improve it. He disdains teachers and the jobs they are doing so much and he values their input on educational improvement so little that only three members of his 21 member task force are teachers. The other eighteen members are education stakeholders.
I wonder how many doctors or lawyers would be on panels discussing legal or medical issues? My bet is it would be more than fourteen percent. Parents are even less represented though some of the Chairman's of this and Presidents of that might be pulling double duty, but for parents only one was invited to join the committee.That’s right folks only one parent and three teachers argulaby the group closests and familuar with the problems in education we’re invited to join this latest task force which by my unoffical count is the 870th created this year alone. I guess Governor Crist thinks he has the teacher vote all sown up after he vetoed senate bill six, the ill advised bill designed to punish teachers and as a result he can, like politicians here in Florida have done for quite sometime, heap subtle disrespects on the back of teachers shoulders.
What does he think is going to happen on the task force? Are they going to come up with a magic bullet that suddenly fixes all the woes in the teaching profession? I have a magic bullet, that’s stop meddling Governor Crist and have your task force members and fellow politicians do the same. The problems in education began to rear their ugly heads when politicians started to interfere just so they could justify their positions, so they could say look at me I am doing something. Sometimes the best action is no action, and steering money away from education to pet projects, unfunded mandates, unrealistic curriculums and bills punishing teachers don’t make things better, they make things worse.
You want to improve things Governor Crist? Then take the staff at the best schools and for one year exchange them with the staffs at a struggling schools. You will find that the result will be at best the same, though they may be worse at the struggling schools. Staffs at struggling schools have become use to little or no parental help, a lack of supplies and doing task after task that only has a peripheral relationship with education, a lack of discipline and little support from their administrations, problems teachers at the most successful schools don’t often face. In the end the struggling staff will not miraculously become awesome and the excellent staff will not suddenly forget how to teach. I say do it because how else are you going to realize that teacher quality is not the problem that you think it is.
Teachers did not gut discipline. Teachers did not create and implement the f-cat. Teachers dis not decide just to have one curriculum. Teachers did not decide that high school kids should take eight classes at a time. Teachers did not steal the joy of learning from may students by forcing them to take classes they aren’t interested in or prepared for. Teachers did not decide to pass kids along without the skills they need to be successful and teachers definitely did not decide to overwhelm themselves with task after task yet all this is going on. How can we expect teachers and students to be successful when faced with these problems. If anything you should be on your knees thanking teachers for showing up day after day and facing these problems like professionals, you should be be paying tribute to the states hard working teachers that they are doing as well as they are when faced with thy are faced with. Governor Crist we don’t have a teacher quality problem we have a common sense problem and we have a leadership problem.
Finally I am not saying teachers have all the answers. I am not saying there isn’t room for improvement in the teaching profession. What I am saying is that the powers-that-be need to include teachers when coming up with the solutions, if not we’ll find ourselves in the same place we are now. Where we are now is not a very good place. Governor Crist I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and believe you are sincere when you say improving education is important.
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