The Florida legislature puts dresses on pigs

The Florida legislature has been busy, the 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.

These bills with their flowery titles are meant to trick and confuse the public and hide their anti-public education agenda. The first two are meant to kneecap teachers unions and the last two are meant to speed up the legislatures 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 stripped teachers of due process and created but didn’t fund merit pay. The truth is teachers need to be protected “from” the Florida legislature because with friends like them they 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 like the Parent Protection act is.

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.

Sometimes known as the Parent Trigger, it is the latest privatization ploy to make its way across the county. 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 the children. The result is that schools are taken away from the locally elected boards and the physical property of the school is handed over to a for-profit management company

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 for any accountability for either how the money is spent or how the kids do. They are just peaches 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 the title of the bills. 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.