DeSantis’s teacher bill of rights is a poison pill meant to destroy public education.

I get DeSantis thinks his followers will believe anything he says but the chutzpah of this fascist to think teachers, the very people he has been calling pedophiles and groomers, and making up one lie after another about, will. DeSantis is a huckster in an ill-fitting suit, whose whole schtick is you can full just enough of the people some of the time.  

Take his teacher's bill of rights. On one hand, he says, here is a little extra money, which would amount to about 1,223 dollars per teacher, and on the other hand, he says and all you must do is sacrifice the only entity which has been a check on his unbridled power and that has fought for teachers, and that’s their unions. That’s not even a pyrrhic victory that’s an unmitigated disaster for teachers.

Here is former DCPS school board member Liz Andersen’s assessment of DeSantis’s laughable proposal.

Via Twitter:

During today’s press conference, Governor DeSantis announced several education priorities for this legislative session. Notably, he touted a Teachers Bill of Rights that ultimately aims to take down Unions. Unions exist to improve the working conditions of Teachers & school staff, and to ensure that student learning is the priority of public education institutions.

Florida is a right to work state, no one is forced to join a Union, but Public Ed is stronger because they exist. Many employees choose to join Teachers Unions because they know that historically Unions have worked to ensure that their rights as people, & the rights of children to get a free, equitable, uniform, safe and appropriate education, are upheld.

Teachers’ unions have fought for things like tenure and academic freedom at a time when teachers were being investigated by political committees during the "Red scare". They have pushed back against low salaries and economic insecurity. When dress codes, policies, and contracts stipulated that “an employed teacher must wear skirts of certain lengths, keep her galoshes buckled, not receive gentleman callers more than three times a week and teach a Sunday School class," the Unions were their voice.

Other employee unions are clearly exempt from these attacks. In a time when McCarthy-era accusations of “subversion” sound all too familiar, & separate but NOT equal seems to be on the rise, it’s no surprise that the powers that be would try to take down the Teachers Union. By seeking to diminish teachers’ unions, Governor DeSantis is disrupting the system of checks and balances professional educators deserve.

If Governor DeSantis is really concerned about how teachers have been treated in Florida, he would understand that the teachers currently were hard won not by the state, but by teachers represented by their union. This attack on teachers unions is the opposite of "empowerment."

https://twitter.com/andersen904/status/1617648450778304526

Everything she wrote is 100 percent correct and I would only change one thing, and that’s it’s a scam.

DeSantis doesn’t want to empower public school teachers, he wants to divide them. He wants to do so because he believes it will hasten the end of public education, so he can enact universal vouchers, something that may happen as soon as this year.

Then all he has to do is sit back and wait for all the conmen, charlatans, and hucksters like him to build capacity, to build enough private schools that public ed no longer exists.

The same guy that accused teachers of trying to get five-year-olds to switch identities and said they can’t be trusted to have classroom libraries, suddenly cares about how teachers feel? How they are doing? Give me a #&%$ break. No, he wants to destroy the last vestige of resistance there is because it will speed up his plan, and if he must throw teachers a few nickels to do so it's not going to matter because all of them are either going to be out of work or working for a private school in a strip mall for 15 bucks an hour.

DeSantis thinks his followers are dumb and thus far they have proved him right and he thinks teachers and public education supporters must be just as dumb, the thing is we have to prove him wrong, or in a generation, there won’t be anything left.