How Florida hates teachers, let me count the ways.

How Florida hates teachers, let me count the ways.

1. They pass a complicated soul crushing merit pay law that makes teachers little more than drones and then they don’t fund the pay part. Rick Scott admitted Florida was going to have a hard time coming up with the money.

2. They tax them three percent more than the rest of the populace. Presumably this money promised to teachers by the way when they took the position was to go the Florida retirement system one of the best around which did not need the extra money. Instead school districts used the savings for other costs.

3. The FCAT has lost any noble purpose it may have once had. Conspiracy theorists say the FCAT was always designed to wreck Florida’s education system so connected individuals could privatize education and where I am not prepared to go that far, the FCAT has destroyed, flexibility, creativity and turned teachers into little more than trained moneys that hit play on a VCR because all we are “told” to do is teach to the test.

4. The push to privatize education will lower pay and decrease benefits. Florida’s teachers are already some of the worse paid in the nation and if teachers are forced to go to private schools and charters once public education is wrecked their pay will only get worse.

5. The citizens of Florida keep electing politicians whose only goal is to privatize public education so they and their cronies, friends and sycophants can make money. Oh like all of these do, this hurts Florida’s children as well.