John Padget vice chair of the state board, clueless or completely clueless?

The biggest problem with public education in Florida is leadership or a lack thereof. Take John Padget the vice chair of the State Board of Education. Despite well documented problems with the Florida Standards Assessment he called for ratcheting up the passing scores as high as possible, which will undoubtedly cause more kids to fail, schools to be labeled as failures and cost teachers their jobs. His reasoning being we are falling behind places like South Korea and Finland.

Mr. Padget who was never an educator obviously doesn’t know it but Finland doesn’t use high stakes standardized tests, in fact they use barely any tests at all. I bet it would greatly upset Padget to know that teachers in Finland are highly unionized and well paid too.

He in effect is calling for us to do more of something that the people he says we need to catch don’t do at all. He is also one of the top education leaders in Florida.

Public schools undoubtedly have problems but most of them have been created by our leaders in Tallahassee and not by our teachers in our classrooms.