Education bills or dresses on pigs?

Putting dresses on pigs

Our legislators like mad scientists have been busy tinkering with education. They have been proposing bill after bill like the Pay Check Protection Act, the Teacher Protection Act, the Parent Protection Act and The Religious Freedom amendment, and with names like that they must really have our best interests in mind, right, right, insert crickets chirping here. Yeah and I have a bridge I am letting go cheap too.

The legislature gives bills flowery titles in an effort to trick and confuse the public and hide the bills real purposes. You see the first two above are meant to kneecap teachers unions and the last two are meant to speed up the their dogged and shameful public school privatization efforts.

The pay check protection act which was designed to end union’s automatic deductions was chosen Florida’s lie of the year by Politfact in 2011, when the legislature attempted to justify it by saying it would save money. Luckily this bill failed to pass but with union haters like John Thrasher and Steve Wise still in Tallahassee who knows if it will make a return or not.

This year’s union busting bill is the Teacher Protection act, though I can’t find any teachers who asked to be protected by Tallahassee. Most of us are still smarting from the Student Success act (SB736) that could have been called the Teacher Hating act, which stripped teachers of due process and created but didn’t fund merit pay. The truth is teachers do need to be protected but they need to be protected “from” the Florida legislature because with friends like them teachers definitely don’t need any enemies.

Vouchers and charter school legislation has been on the rise for the last view years. The legislature uses more flowery language like parent choice, but the truth is these bills are designed to privatize education and the Parent Protection act is their latest attempt to do so.

The legislature may have run into a buzz saw with this one as parent groups like, Citizens for Strong Schools, 50th No More, Florida PTA, Fund Education Now, Marion’s United for Public Education, Save Duval Schools and Support Dade Schools have all come out against it. That’s parent groups against the Parent Protection act and that should tell the public something.

Sometimes known as the Parent Trigger, it is the latest legislation republicans across the nation are using to make a buck off education. It uses parents as a tool to pull the “trigger” and hand their neighborhood school over to a private entity with no guarantee of gaining anything better for their children. The results are that schools are taken away from the locally elected boards and the physical property of the school is handed over, confiscated and given to for-profit management companies.

Then there is the Religious Freedom amendment, which basically seeks to repeal the Blaine amendment. You know that pesky provision that assures the separation of church and state. The legislature wants to funnel public money to religious private schools through vouchers. They are so nice they don’t even ask the schools to provide any accountability for either how the money is spent or how the kids do. They are just peaches with the public’s money right?

Friends what’s the message here? Be careful, do your research and due diligence, don’t just listen to what the legislature says or look at what the title of bills are. After all you can put perfume, a nice dress and a hat on a pig, but at the end of the day you still just have a pig.

Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher