Are the wheels coming off the Senate Bill 736 wagon?

From Scathing Purple Musings, by Bob Sykes

Rick Scott told FOX News host Neil Cavuto after SB736 was past, “It’s going to be great.”

Not so much. Changes are already being considered. Bush Foundation CEO Patricia Levesque wants to add student surveys into the calculus and is floating the idea around. Senate Education chairman John Legg has said his committee will be considering changes to the bill. The committee’s vice chair was more poignant. This from Travis Pillow in theTallahassee Democrat:

State Sen. Bill Montford, a Democrat from Tallahassee, has a broader range of concerns with the law.

He said placing new teachers on one-year contracts for the rest of their careers undermines their job security and could make it more difficult to attract new people to the teaching profession.

“The damage it’s doing we won’t see until five, six years down the road, when we don’t have the good qualified applicants coming into teaching,” Montford told the gathering of school administrators.

People may not take jobs in education for the money, he said, but “there’s limit to how far people will sacrifice.”

This is at odds with something else Scott said after SB736 was passed. More from Pillow:

“We must recruit and retain the best people to make sure every classroom in Florida has a highly effective teacher,” Scott said in a statement after signing the bill at a Jacksonville charter school.

Just how much Scott has become embarrassed about all this is unclear. It turned out that the KIPP charter school he signed the bill earned an F. The chairman of that KIPP school, Gary Chartrand, was named by Scott to the Florida Board of Education. Chartrand now is state board chairman. The first roll-out of SB736 this year turned out to be another disaster. The hearings in Legg’s and Montford’s committee will provide more fireworks.

Meanwhile a legal challenge to SB736 is underway in a Tallahassee courtroom.

http://bobsidlethoughtsandmusings.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/skepticism-for-sb736-in-the-florida-senate/#comment-4936