Florida's scam of the century, unfunded merit pay

From the Palm Beach Post with a nod to Scathing Purple Musings

by Randy Schultz

Anyone who knows the politics of public education in Florida would have seen it coming. We at The Post did. Now, though, we can confirm that another Great Tallahassee Schools Scam is heading our way.

This one is about merit pay, the latest supposed miracle cure for education. The Legislature passed a merit-pay plan in 2010, but Gov. Crist - desperate for non-Republican votes - vetoed the bill that teachers hated. Teachers didn't much like the similar bill the Legislature passed this year, but there's a new governor who doesn't need the teacher unions, and he signed it with gusto.

The plan is supposed to work this way: A sure-fire evaluation system will separate good teachers from slackers. Overachievers will get more money - merit pay - and underachievers will get fired. Repeat each year. Pretty soon, Florida will have nothing but good teachers.

Any change that makes it easier to fire underperforming teachers would help, but those reading closely would have asked: Where will the money for merit pay come from? If you listened to the debates in Tallahassee, you would have assumed that the money would come from the state. And why wouldn't it? This order is coming from the state, not county school districts. It's top-down management from a Legislature that claims to cherish local control.

Last Monday, though, Florida Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson met with The Palm Beach Post Editorial Board. We asked who would pay for merit pay. The state? Nope. "It will be up to local school districts," Mr. Robinson said. "It always was going to be state and local."

In other words, school districts that already face budget cuts for next year - about $53 million, in Palm Beach County's case - will have to find money for a program they didn't want. If the districts don't find the money, the Legislature will blame them for failing to support good teachers, blocking education reform and undermining Florida's economic future. Or worse.

It's typical Tallahassee, which supports public education right up the point of paying for it.

Further, Commissioner Robinson is hardly the person to claim that it was "always" going to be a state-local split. He was hired in June, three months after Gov. Scott signed the merit-pay bill. Commissioner Robinson came from Virginia having no connection to Florida.

Commissioner Robinson is personable, and he seems genuinely interested in making the Department of Education a "resource" for teachers. Three times during our meeting, however, he referred to school "districts" as "divisions." His résumé includes about one year of actual teaching. Yet he is responsible for the state's review of merit-pay plans from all 67 counties.

Aside from the suspicion that the merit-pay program may come only with punishment for slackers, there's the question of whether any evaluation will be credible. Commissioner Robinson pointed out that the full merit-pay program, which abolishes tenure for teachers and creates end-of-course exams in all subjects, doesn't begin until 2014. He was hinting that, if the economy cooperates, the Legislature would be able to find money to pay for merit pay.

It won't happen. Nothing in recent Florida history gives any hope that it will happen.

In 1986, voters approved the lottery, which was supposed to "enhance" public education. When the lottery started two years later, the Legislature, then under Democratic control, began reducing the amount of money budgeted for education from the state's general fund. Lottery money that was supposed to "enhance" had to be spent on the basics.

During the early 1990s recession, the Legislature cut public education severely. When the economy recovered, school districts never were made whole. The same thing happened after the recession a decade ago. Indeed, "new" money came not from the Legislature but from the Legislature ordering school districts to raise local property taxes that support education. No one in Tallahassee ever "raises taxes." Imagine what the long-term damage to education will be from the Great Recession.

Almost everything that the Legislature has done in the past 12 years regarding public education has been wrong. In 1999, the Legislature based public education on a standardized test given two-thirds of the way through the school year and on school grades that are based on that test according to a formula that has changed almost every year.

Now comes merit pay, and because of Commissioner Robinson we know that, once again, Tallahassee is prepared to blame school districts for problems while sending them the bill - with gusto.

Randy Schultz is the editor of editorial page of The Palm Beach Post. His email address is schultz@pbpost.com.

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/columnists/schultz-tallahassee-doesnt-plan-to-pay-for-merit-2036988.html