Matt Damon sat down with Piers Morgan for an interview that will air Thursday night, and among other things, talked about his feelings on the first two years of President Obama's administration. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Damon was a vocal Obama supporter, campaigning for the then-candidate at rallies, promoting him through a MoveOn video contest and attending fundraisers for him.
Now, he's not so enthused about Obama. When asked if he was happy with the way the President is running the country, Damon said, point blank, "no."
"I really think he misinterpreted his mandate. A friend of mine said to me the other day, I thought it was a great line, 'I no longer hope for audacity,'" Damon said. "He's doubled down on a lot of things, going back to education... the idea that we're testing kids and we're tying teachers salaries to how kids are performing on tests, that kind of mechanized thinking has nothing to do with higher order. We're training them, not teaching them.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/02/matt-damon-calls-out-obama_n_830533.html
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Duval county school board gets it wrong again
What does a brother have to do to get on a board
The school board is starting another board to work with our intervening schools and they think we should be okay with that. I am not.
Friends if you support the school board in this venture not only are going against the law but you are supporting generations’ worth of failed policies. You are supporting sending more children into adulthood without the skills they need to be successful and you are supporting a plan switching the schools into two smaller theme based schools each) which is doomed to fail because it doesn’t address the problems those schools are facing.
I didn’t recognize most of the names on the board and I hope the Times Union will give us at least blurbs about them. I also hope these people are not just friends and sycophants of the school board and I don’t want people who think this would be a cool line to have on their resume either.
The board needs to be comprised of people who are willing to tell the board when they are wrong, stand their ground and then to give alternatives; for a decade now the city has sat passively by while the school board tried one failed idea after another and we don’t need another blue ribbon panel to allow that to happen, to rubber stamp whatever they want.
In fact I want people who are angry on this board, people who are fed up with the way the school district has been treating the North and West sides of Jacksonville and who say we’re not going to lose children through failed policies anymore and we’re not going to take it anymore.
That’s what I support Mrs. Burney, that and you and the board stepping out of the way and letting them work, after all you haven’t just had your chance but you have had plenty of chances. If you care about our children and our city that’s what I think the people of Jacksonville should support too.
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
The school board is starting another board to work with our intervening schools and they think we should be okay with that. I am not.
Friends if you support the school board in this venture not only are going against the law but you are supporting generations’ worth of failed policies. You are supporting sending more children into adulthood without the skills they need to be successful and you are supporting a plan switching the schools into two smaller theme based schools each) which is doomed to fail because it doesn’t address the problems those schools are facing.
I didn’t recognize most of the names on the board and I hope the Times Union will give us at least blurbs about them. I also hope these people are not just friends and sycophants of the school board and I don’t want people who think this would be a cool line to have on their resume either.
The board needs to be comprised of people who are willing to tell the board when they are wrong, stand their ground and then to give alternatives; for a decade now the city has sat passively by while the school board tried one failed idea after another and we don’t need another blue ribbon panel to allow that to happen, to rubber stamp whatever they want.
In fact I want people who are angry on this board, people who are fed up with the way the school district has been treating the North and West sides of Jacksonville and who say we’re not going to lose children through failed policies anymore and we’re not going to take it anymore.
That’s what I support Mrs. Burney, that and you and the board stepping out of the way and letting them work, after all you haven’t just had your chance but you have had plenty of chances. If you care about our children and our city that’s what I think the people of Jacksonville should support too.
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
The disapointing Obama education experience continues
From the Washinton Posts Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss
At a time when Wisconsin teachers are protesting to keep their collective bargaining rights, President Obama is traveling to Florida to share a stage with former governor Jeb Bush, the king of corporate-driven, standardized test-obsessed school reform that devalues teachers and their unions.
What a tag team.
Obama is scheduled to speak to the students and faculty of Miami Central Senior High about the importance of out-educating the competition to secure America’s future. (That’s highly unlikely, with states cutting billions of dollars out of school budgets and with a reform agenda that is focused on expanding charter schools, assessing teachers based on students’ standardized test scores and the like, but never mind.)
Obama is appearing in Florida as state legislators move toward passing legislation (Senate Bill 736, HB 7019) that:
* Ties at least half of a teacher’s salary to how well his/her students perform on standardized tests
* Prevents consideration of many advanced degrees and special training to be considered in determining a teacher’s salary
* Eliminates tenure for teachers hired after the summer of 2014
* Requires the creation of new standardized assessments for all courses, though it doesn’t suggest where the money will come from to pay.
Similar legislation passed last year but was vetoed by then-Gov. Charlie Crist. The new governor, Rick Scott, not only supports the legislation but had dangled the idea of taking apart the way public education is financed in Florida and handing money over to all parents in a new “voucher” system that would have made it virtually impossible to maintain local public schools. Scott has put that idea aside for now.
Obama has gone out of his way to be bipartisan in the education reform arena, which would be good if the Republicans were right about reform, but they aren’t either. Rather than eliminate the most egregious parts of No Child Left Behind, the signature education initiative of Jeb Bush’s brother, former president George W. Bush, Obama is building on some of them, making them even worse.
For example, instead of using standardized test scores to evaluate only schools and students, they now will be linked to how much a teacher is paid (even though we all know that a teacher isn’t solely responsible for how well a kid does on a test). It’s a bad idea, not championed by assessment experts and not borne out by research, but it’s the reform idea du jour, backed by Gates Foundation money and Obama’s policy agenda.
Breaking bread with Jeb Bush on school reform should be a questionable proposition for a president from a party that has traditionally championed public education (which is not to say it doesn’t need reform) and teachers unions (which is not to say that they should not reform).
Florida is increasingly being looked to as a national model of education reform, and we have Jeb Bush to thank for that. The state began to overhaul its public education system after Jeb Bush became governor in 1999, and it has been a leader in reforms centered around standardized tests, the expansion of charter schools, virtual education and merit pay. He long tried to reduce the power of teachers unions -- being very vocal about his aims -- and last year campaigned for legislation that would eliminate teacher tenure.
Under Bush, the state did make progress early on by focusing on reading and creating a statewide reading research center while hiring reading coaches.
The biggest improvement in Florida’s scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card, were in elementary reading, which suggests that this focus worked. The achievement gap for different demographic groups between 1998 and 2009 also shrunk for fourth- and eighth-grade reading between students who were in the federal lunch program (low-income families qualify) and those who do not qualify, according to a post by Florida educator Sherman Dorn.
But the achievement gap didn’t budge for 8th-grade writing or for math in any grade. Here’s the main point: Bush doesn’t talk about his reading initiative when he talks about his success, instead crediting his standardized testing regime.
The scheduled Obama-Jeb Bush fest is symbolic of how far afield Democrats have gone with school reform.
Obama last month expressed support for the Wisconsin teachers, who have been protesting to keep the collective bargaining rights (and that of other public employees) that the governor, Scott Walker, is intent on taking away. Wisconsin teachers already made concessions on monetary issues.
Obama said: "Some of what I’ve heard coming out of Wisconsin, where you’re just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain, generally seems like more of an assault on unions. And I think it’s very important for us to understand that public employees, they’re our neighbors, they’re our friends. These are folks who are teachers and they’re firefighters and they’re social workers and they’re police officers.”
So, at this point in time, when teachers in Wisconsin and elsewhere feel besieged, I’m wondering why Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are flying to Florida to be with Republicans who have been part of the attack force. Why, when teachers are fighting for union rights, does the president decide to spend time with anti-teachers union school reformers?
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/obamas-questionable-trip-to-mi.html?wprss=answer-sheet
By Valerie Strauss
At a time when Wisconsin teachers are protesting to keep their collective bargaining rights, President Obama is traveling to Florida to share a stage with former governor Jeb Bush, the king of corporate-driven, standardized test-obsessed school reform that devalues teachers and their unions.
What a tag team.
Obama is scheduled to speak to the students and faculty of Miami Central Senior High about the importance of out-educating the competition to secure America’s future. (That’s highly unlikely, with states cutting billions of dollars out of school budgets and with a reform agenda that is focused on expanding charter schools, assessing teachers based on students’ standardized test scores and the like, but never mind.)
Obama is appearing in Florida as state legislators move toward passing legislation (Senate Bill 736, HB 7019) that:
* Ties at least half of a teacher’s salary to how well his/her students perform on standardized tests
* Prevents consideration of many advanced degrees and special training to be considered in determining a teacher’s salary
* Eliminates tenure for teachers hired after the summer of 2014
* Requires the creation of new standardized assessments for all courses, though it doesn’t suggest where the money will come from to pay.
Similar legislation passed last year but was vetoed by then-Gov. Charlie Crist. The new governor, Rick Scott, not only supports the legislation but had dangled the idea of taking apart the way public education is financed in Florida and handing money over to all parents in a new “voucher” system that would have made it virtually impossible to maintain local public schools. Scott has put that idea aside for now.
Obama has gone out of his way to be bipartisan in the education reform arena, which would be good if the Republicans were right about reform, but they aren’t either. Rather than eliminate the most egregious parts of No Child Left Behind, the signature education initiative of Jeb Bush’s brother, former president George W. Bush, Obama is building on some of them, making them even worse.
For example, instead of using standardized test scores to evaluate only schools and students, they now will be linked to how much a teacher is paid (even though we all know that a teacher isn’t solely responsible for how well a kid does on a test). It’s a bad idea, not championed by assessment experts and not borne out by research, but it’s the reform idea du jour, backed by Gates Foundation money and Obama’s policy agenda.
Breaking bread with Jeb Bush on school reform should be a questionable proposition for a president from a party that has traditionally championed public education (which is not to say it doesn’t need reform) and teachers unions (which is not to say that they should not reform).
Florida is increasingly being looked to as a national model of education reform, and we have Jeb Bush to thank for that. The state began to overhaul its public education system after Jeb Bush became governor in 1999, and it has been a leader in reforms centered around standardized tests, the expansion of charter schools, virtual education and merit pay. He long tried to reduce the power of teachers unions -- being very vocal about his aims -- and last year campaigned for legislation that would eliminate teacher tenure.
Under Bush, the state did make progress early on by focusing on reading and creating a statewide reading research center while hiring reading coaches.
The biggest improvement in Florida’s scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card, were in elementary reading, which suggests that this focus worked. The achievement gap for different demographic groups between 1998 and 2009 also shrunk for fourth- and eighth-grade reading between students who were in the federal lunch program (low-income families qualify) and those who do not qualify, according to a post by Florida educator Sherman Dorn.
But the achievement gap didn’t budge for 8th-grade writing or for math in any grade. Here’s the main point: Bush doesn’t talk about his reading initiative when he talks about his success, instead crediting his standardized testing regime.
The scheduled Obama-Jeb Bush fest is symbolic of how far afield Democrats have gone with school reform.
Obama last month expressed support for the Wisconsin teachers, who have been protesting to keep the collective bargaining rights (and that of other public employees) that the governor, Scott Walker, is intent on taking away. Wisconsin teachers already made concessions on monetary issues.
Obama said: "Some of what I’ve heard coming out of Wisconsin, where you’re just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain, generally seems like more of an assault on unions. And I think it’s very important for us to understand that public employees, they’re our neighbors, they’re our friends. These are folks who are teachers and they’re firefighters and they’re social workers and they’re police officers.”
So, at this point in time, when teachers in Wisconsin and elsewhere feel besieged, I’m wondering why Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are flying to Florida to be with Republicans who have been part of the attack force. Why, when teachers are fighting for union rights, does the president decide to spend time with anti-teachers union school reformers?
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/obamas-questionable-trip-to-mi.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Facts don't matter, supporters of Merit Pay say
By Christopher Connell, The Hechinger Report
NASHVILLE — Offering middle-school math teachers bonuses up to $15,000 did not produce gains in student test scores, Vanderbilt University researchers reported Tuesday in what they said was the first scientifically rigorous test of merit pay.
The results (pdf) could amount to a cautionary flag about paying teachers for the performance of their students, a reform strategy the Obama administration and many states and school districts have favored despite lukewarm support or outright opposition from teachers' unions.
The U.S. Department of Education has put a great deal of effort into prodding school districts and states to try merit-pay systems as part of its Race to the Top competition, although teachers' unions have often objected on the grounds that they don't have fair and reliable ways to measure performance. In most school districts, teacher pay is based on years of experience and educational attainment levels.
The report's authors, of the National Center on Performance Incentives (NCPI) at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of Education, stress that theirs is just one approach. The Nashville teachers who hit the mark based on their students' test scores received a bump in their paychecks but no additional mentoring or professional development. Neither their principals nor fellow teachers knew who participated in the experiment or who received bonuses.
Matthew G. Springer, director of the federally funded NCPI, said pay-for-performance is not "the magic bullet that so often the policy world is looking for."
At least in this experiment, Springer said, "it doesn't work."
The study was conducted from 2006 to 2009 in partnership with the nonprofit RAND Corporation. A local industrialist and Vanderbilt benefactor, Orrin Ingram, put up the nearly $1.3 million in bonuses.
Some 296 middle-school math teachers — two-thirds of the district's middle-school math teachers — volunteered to participate in the experiment. Half were placed randomly in a control group, while the rest were eligible for bonuses of $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000 if their pupils scored significantly higher than expected on the statewide exam known as the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program.
One third of the eligible teachers — 51 of 152, or 34% — got bonuses at least once. Eighteen teachers received bonuses all three years.
Except for some temporary gains for fifth-graders, though, their students progressed no faster than those in classes taught by the 146 other teachers.
The local teachers' union in Nashville agreed to the experiment in collective bargaining, according to Erick Huth, president of the Metropolitan Nashville Education Association. He said the results were not at all surprising.
"I've believed for a long time that what improves instruction is having an instructional leader who is able to get all players in a school to collaborate," Huth said
The bonuses amounted to as much as 30% of teachers' yearly salaries here in the Music City, where the scale runs from $36,000 to $64,000, Huth said. The nation's 3.2 million public school teachers earned $53,910 on average in 2008-09, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The study was released at a two-day conference, "Evaluating and Rewarding Educator Effectiveness," at Vanderbilt's Peabody College that drew participants from Colorado, Georgia, Tennessee, Washington, D.C. and other places conducting their own experiments with performance pay. Some states have moved to tie teacher and principal evaluations to student test scores.
The study did not shake the faith of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in merit pay.
"While this is a good study, it only looked at the narrow question of whether more pay motivates teachers to try harder," said Sandra Abrevaya, a spokeswoman for Duncan. It did not address the Obama administration's push to "change the culture of teaching by giving all educators the feedback they need to get better."
The Nashville experiment, known as POINT (Project on Incentives in Teaching), doled out the $15,000 bonuses to those teachers whose students performed "at a level that historically had been reached by only the top 5% of middle school math teachers." Teacher performance was calculated by using a value-added model, which predicts how students will do in a given year based on how they performed in the previous year. The teachers had to hit the 80th and 90th percentiles to pocket the $5,000 and $10,000 bonuses, respectively.
The study's design, in which teachers were judged against percentile benchmarks rather than their colleagues' performance, sought to preserve collaboration among teachers.
In surveys about the program, most teachers said they were already effective without the incentive of additional pay. Eight in ten said they didn't change the way they taught to improve their odds of earning a bonus. Many teachers came close to getting a bonus — so close that they would have qualified if their pupils answered two or three more questions correctly on the 55-question state exam.
The Nashville math teachers, according to the study, "expressed moderately favorable views toward performance pay in general, though less so for POINT in particular." The experiment ran smoothly, although the teachers became less enthusiastic over the three years. "They did not come away … thinking it had harmed their schools," the study said. "But by and large, they did not endorse the notion that bonus recipients were better teachers."
The fact that many fifth-grade teachers teach multiple subjects to the same students may have been a reason for the positive impact of merit pay found in fifth grade, according to the study's authors. But "the effect did not last. By the end of 6th grade it did not matter whether a student's 5th grade math teacher had been in the treatment or control group," the study said.
The researchers said the Nashville experiment didn't stir the negative reactions that have attended some other merit pay programs, but it "simply did not do much of anything."
Springer of NCPI said the study lays a foundation for further experiments on a topic that educators have been debating "for over a century."
Tennessee Commissioner of Education Timothy Webb said the Nashville study shows, "Money alone is not enough to encourage people to go into challenging schools and teach the most difficult students." He stressed the importance of improving teachers' working conditions, not just their pay.
Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., said he does not believe the study says much of value and worries it will only confuse the issue.
"The fact that that teachers don't respond to cash bonuses like rats do to food-pellets does nothing to diminish my confidence that it's good for schooling if teacher pay better reflects the contributions that teachers make," Hess said. "Serious proponents of merit pay believe the point is not any kind of short-term test-score bump but making the profession more attractive to talented candidates."
William Slotnik, executive director of the Boston-based Institute for Compensation Reform and Student Learning at the Community Training and Assistance Center, has argued that performance-based compensation tied directly to the educational mission of a school district can be a lever to transform schools. But he said it will take more than financial incentives to improve student achievement and that merit pay "is hard to get right. … If all you are doing is focusing on money, there is no track record in that resulting in the kind of changes needed to do this work well."
Contributing: Christopher Connell is a freelance writer. Liz Willen contributed to this article. It was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Columbia University
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-09-21-merit-pay_N.htm
NASHVILLE — Offering middle-school math teachers bonuses up to $15,000 did not produce gains in student test scores, Vanderbilt University researchers reported Tuesday in what they said was the first scientifically rigorous test of merit pay.
The results (pdf) could amount to a cautionary flag about paying teachers for the performance of their students, a reform strategy the Obama administration and many states and school districts have favored despite lukewarm support or outright opposition from teachers' unions.
The U.S. Department of Education has put a great deal of effort into prodding school districts and states to try merit-pay systems as part of its Race to the Top competition, although teachers' unions have often objected on the grounds that they don't have fair and reliable ways to measure performance. In most school districts, teacher pay is based on years of experience and educational attainment levels.
The report's authors, of the National Center on Performance Incentives (NCPI) at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of Education, stress that theirs is just one approach. The Nashville teachers who hit the mark based on their students' test scores received a bump in their paychecks but no additional mentoring or professional development. Neither their principals nor fellow teachers knew who participated in the experiment or who received bonuses.
Matthew G. Springer, director of the federally funded NCPI, said pay-for-performance is not "the magic bullet that so often the policy world is looking for."
At least in this experiment, Springer said, "it doesn't work."
The study was conducted from 2006 to 2009 in partnership with the nonprofit RAND Corporation. A local industrialist and Vanderbilt benefactor, Orrin Ingram, put up the nearly $1.3 million in bonuses.
Some 296 middle-school math teachers — two-thirds of the district's middle-school math teachers — volunteered to participate in the experiment. Half were placed randomly in a control group, while the rest were eligible for bonuses of $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000 if their pupils scored significantly higher than expected on the statewide exam known as the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program.
One third of the eligible teachers — 51 of 152, or 34% — got bonuses at least once. Eighteen teachers received bonuses all three years.
Except for some temporary gains for fifth-graders, though, their students progressed no faster than those in classes taught by the 146 other teachers.
The local teachers' union in Nashville agreed to the experiment in collective bargaining, according to Erick Huth, president of the Metropolitan Nashville Education Association. He said the results were not at all surprising.
"I've believed for a long time that what improves instruction is having an instructional leader who is able to get all players in a school to collaborate," Huth said
The bonuses amounted to as much as 30% of teachers' yearly salaries here in the Music City, where the scale runs from $36,000 to $64,000, Huth said. The nation's 3.2 million public school teachers earned $53,910 on average in 2008-09, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The study was released at a two-day conference, "Evaluating and Rewarding Educator Effectiveness," at Vanderbilt's Peabody College that drew participants from Colorado, Georgia, Tennessee, Washington, D.C. and other places conducting their own experiments with performance pay. Some states have moved to tie teacher and principal evaluations to student test scores.
The study did not shake the faith of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in merit pay.
"While this is a good study, it only looked at the narrow question of whether more pay motivates teachers to try harder," said Sandra Abrevaya, a spokeswoman for Duncan. It did not address the Obama administration's push to "change the culture of teaching by giving all educators the feedback they need to get better."
The Nashville experiment, known as POINT (Project on Incentives in Teaching), doled out the $15,000 bonuses to those teachers whose students performed "at a level that historically had been reached by only the top 5% of middle school math teachers." Teacher performance was calculated by using a value-added model, which predicts how students will do in a given year based on how they performed in the previous year. The teachers had to hit the 80th and 90th percentiles to pocket the $5,000 and $10,000 bonuses, respectively.
The study's design, in which teachers were judged against percentile benchmarks rather than their colleagues' performance, sought to preserve collaboration among teachers.
In surveys about the program, most teachers said they were already effective without the incentive of additional pay. Eight in ten said they didn't change the way they taught to improve their odds of earning a bonus. Many teachers came close to getting a bonus — so close that they would have qualified if their pupils answered two or three more questions correctly on the 55-question state exam.
The Nashville math teachers, according to the study, "expressed moderately favorable views toward performance pay in general, though less so for POINT in particular." The experiment ran smoothly, although the teachers became less enthusiastic over the three years. "They did not come away … thinking it had harmed their schools," the study said. "But by and large, they did not endorse the notion that bonus recipients were better teachers."
The fact that many fifth-grade teachers teach multiple subjects to the same students may have been a reason for the positive impact of merit pay found in fifth grade, according to the study's authors. But "the effect did not last. By the end of 6th grade it did not matter whether a student's 5th grade math teacher had been in the treatment or control group," the study said.
The researchers said the Nashville experiment didn't stir the negative reactions that have attended some other merit pay programs, but it "simply did not do much of anything."
Springer of NCPI said the study lays a foundation for further experiments on a topic that educators have been debating "for over a century."
Tennessee Commissioner of Education Timothy Webb said the Nashville study shows, "Money alone is not enough to encourage people to go into challenging schools and teach the most difficult students." He stressed the importance of improving teachers' working conditions, not just their pay.
Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., said he does not believe the study says much of value and worries it will only confuse the issue.
"The fact that that teachers don't respond to cash bonuses like rats do to food-pellets does nothing to diminish my confidence that it's good for schooling if teacher pay better reflects the contributions that teachers make," Hess said. "Serious proponents of merit pay believe the point is not any kind of short-term test-score bump but making the profession more attractive to talented candidates."
William Slotnik, executive director of the Boston-based Institute for Compensation Reform and Student Learning at the Community Training and Assistance Center, has argued that performance-based compensation tied directly to the educational mission of a school district can be a lever to transform schools. But he said it will take more than financial incentives to improve student achievement and that merit pay "is hard to get right. … If all you are doing is focusing on money, there is no track record in that resulting in the kind of changes needed to do this work well."
Contributing: Christopher Connell is a freelance writer. Liz Willen contributed to this article. It was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Columbia University
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-09-21-merit-pay_N.htm
New Education Insanity
From Education Week
by Diane Ravitch
I'm beginning to think we are living in a moment of national insanity. On the one hand, we hear pious exhortations about education reform, endlessly uttered by our leaders in high political office, corporate suites, foundations, and the media. President Obama says we have to "out-educate" the rest of the world to "win the future."
Yet the reality on the ground suggests that the corporate reform movement—embraced by so many of those same leaders, including the president—will set American education back, by how many years or decades is anyone's guess. Sometimes I think we are hurtling back a century or more, to the age of the Robber Barons and the great corporate trusts.
Consider a few events of the past week:
In Detroit, the school system will reduce its deficit by closing half the city's public schools and creating classes of as many as 60 students. These are among the poorest and lowest-performing students in the nation. Parents and teachers should be rioting in the streets of Detroit, along with everyone who cares about these children and our future. This is an outrage.
The school board of Providence, R.I., voted to fire all of its teachers to address its deficit. Most will be rehired, but now the board has maximum flexibility to choose which ones. At the same time, Providence's leaders are humiliating every teacher, breaking the bonds of trust that are essential for the culture of a good school. Will anyone hold these reckless, heedless, unprofessional "leaders" in Rhode Island to account?
And, in Idaho, the state superintendent of education has proposed a plan that would lay off 770 teachers over five years, banking on students taking more online courses. Do they know there is no evidence for the efficacy of virtual learning? I don't think they care. For them, this is just a cost-cutting measure. And it's other people's children who will get this bargain-basement training, not their own.
If more was needed to strip away the mask of "reform," consider the deafening silence of the corporate school reformers in response to these events. A few, like Joe Williams of Democrats for Educational Reform, surprised their confreres (and me) by siding with the teachers of Wisconsin. Most, however, complained that public employees are overpaid, have unnecessarily rich benefits, and need a comeuppance. All those who wrote such articles enjoy comfortable upper-middle-class lives; do they want to reduce teachers to penury? Some circulated spurious claims that Wisconsin's schools were dreadful because only one-third of 8th graders were proficient on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment in 2009; I assume they don't realize that "proficient" on NAEP is far higher than proficient on state tests and is equivalent to an "A."
I was disappointed when my friend Rick Hess, who blogs for Education Week, expressed his support for Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker (I Stand With Governor Walker); in another piece, Rick reported that the average salary of Wisconsin teachers was about $52,600 in 2009-10. I wonder what the average salary is for professionals at the American Enterprise Institute, where Rick does his thinking and writing. I'm sure it's far more than what teachers earn, and that the working conditions are pleasanter, the stress level lower, and the responsibilities fewer.
The corporate reformers have done a good job of persuading the media that our public schools are failing because they are overrun by bad teachers, and these bad teachers have lifetime tenure because of their powerful unions. (See the corporate reform film, "Waiting for Superman"). I'm sorry to say that Race to the Top, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have stirred up a frenzy of anti-teacher sentiment that hurts even our very best teachers, by their much-publicized search for "bad teachers."
National Board-certified teachers are organizing a march on Washington this July to fight back against the vilification of their profession. Their website is www.saveourschoolsmarch.org.
In the wake of the attacks on teachers and public schools this past year, the haters of teachers feel respectable as they write their venomous diatribes and post them widely. When I recently defended teachers and their right to bargain collectively on CNN.com, I was startled by the raw expressions of rage in the thousands of comments that poured in.
So much madness on the loose. So many districts firing teachers and closing schools. So many legislators slashing education budgets while refusing to raise taxes on millionaires or allowing taxes on the wealthiest to expire as they lay off teachers.
What do we hear from the corporate reformers? Merit pay. Really? Bonuses for some, layoffs for others? Fire teachers with low value-added scores? Ah, more teaching to the test, more narrowing the curriculum.
Nothing to improve education. Just "innovation" (i.e., no evidence) and "disruption" (I.e., firing the whole staff, closing the school).
Our schools remain subject to a failed federal accountability system. We are packing children into crowded classrooms, ignoring the growing levels of child poverty (the U.S. now leads all advanced nations in infant mortality), and putting fear into the hearts of our nation's teachers. Who will want to teach? How does any of this improve schools or benefit children? Do you understand it? I don't.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2011/03/dear_deborah_lucky_for_you.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BridgingDifferences+%28Education+Week+Blog%3A+Bridging+Differences%29
by Diane Ravitch
I'm beginning to think we are living in a moment of national insanity. On the one hand, we hear pious exhortations about education reform, endlessly uttered by our leaders in high political office, corporate suites, foundations, and the media. President Obama says we have to "out-educate" the rest of the world to "win the future."
Yet the reality on the ground suggests that the corporate reform movement—embraced by so many of those same leaders, including the president—will set American education back, by how many years or decades is anyone's guess. Sometimes I think we are hurtling back a century or more, to the age of the Robber Barons and the great corporate trusts.
Consider a few events of the past week:
In Detroit, the school system will reduce its deficit by closing half the city's public schools and creating classes of as many as 60 students. These are among the poorest and lowest-performing students in the nation. Parents and teachers should be rioting in the streets of Detroit, along with everyone who cares about these children and our future. This is an outrage.
The school board of Providence, R.I., voted to fire all of its teachers to address its deficit. Most will be rehired, but now the board has maximum flexibility to choose which ones. At the same time, Providence's leaders are humiliating every teacher, breaking the bonds of trust that are essential for the culture of a good school. Will anyone hold these reckless, heedless, unprofessional "leaders" in Rhode Island to account?
And, in Idaho, the state superintendent of education has proposed a plan that would lay off 770 teachers over five years, banking on students taking more online courses. Do they know there is no evidence for the efficacy of virtual learning? I don't think they care. For them, this is just a cost-cutting measure. And it's other people's children who will get this bargain-basement training, not their own.
If more was needed to strip away the mask of "reform," consider the deafening silence of the corporate school reformers in response to these events. A few, like Joe Williams of Democrats for Educational Reform, surprised their confreres (and me) by siding with the teachers of Wisconsin. Most, however, complained that public employees are overpaid, have unnecessarily rich benefits, and need a comeuppance. All those who wrote such articles enjoy comfortable upper-middle-class lives; do they want to reduce teachers to penury? Some circulated spurious claims that Wisconsin's schools were dreadful because only one-third of 8th graders were proficient on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment in 2009; I assume they don't realize that "proficient" on NAEP is far higher than proficient on state tests and is equivalent to an "A."
I was disappointed when my friend Rick Hess, who blogs for Education Week, expressed his support for Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker (I Stand With Governor Walker); in another piece, Rick reported that the average salary of Wisconsin teachers was about $52,600 in 2009-10. I wonder what the average salary is for professionals at the American Enterprise Institute, where Rick does his thinking and writing. I'm sure it's far more than what teachers earn, and that the working conditions are pleasanter, the stress level lower, and the responsibilities fewer.
The corporate reformers have done a good job of persuading the media that our public schools are failing because they are overrun by bad teachers, and these bad teachers have lifetime tenure because of their powerful unions. (See the corporate reform film, "Waiting for Superman"). I'm sorry to say that Race to the Top, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have stirred up a frenzy of anti-teacher sentiment that hurts even our very best teachers, by their much-publicized search for "bad teachers."
National Board-certified teachers are organizing a march on Washington this July to fight back against the vilification of their profession. Their website is www.saveourschoolsmarch.org.
In the wake of the attacks on teachers and public schools this past year, the haters of teachers feel respectable as they write their venomous diatribes and post them widely. When I recently defended teachers and their right to bargain collectively on CNN.com, I was startled by the raw expressions of rage in the thousands of comments that poured in.
So much madness on the loose. So many districts firing teachers and closing schools. So many legislators slashing education budgets while refusing to raise taxes on millionaires or allowing taxes on the wealthiest to expire as they lay off teachers.
What do we hear from the corporate reformers? Merit pay. Really? Bonuses for some, layoffs for others? Fire teachers with low value-added scores? Ah, more teaching to the test, more narrowing the curriculum.
Nothing to improve education. Just "innovation" (i.e., no evidence) and "disruption" (I.e., firing the whole staff, closing the school).
Our schools remain subject to a failed federal accountability system. We are packing children into crowded classrooms, ignoring the growing levels of child poverty (the U.S. now leads all advanced nations in infant mortality), and putting fear into the hearts of our nation's teachers. Who will want to teach? How does any of this improve schools or benefit children? Do you understand it? I don't.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2011/03/dear_deborah_lucky_for_you.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BridgingDifferences+%28Education+Week+Blog%3A+Bridging+Differences%29
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Major Cuts to Florida Education
From the Daytona Beach News Journal
Major cuts to school budgets as federal stimulus funding dries up. Tying teacher evaluations to student performance on standardized tests. Expanding vouchers and virtual school programs.
The legislative session that starts March 8 is likely to be pivotal in shaping the future of education in Volusia and Flagler counties and the rest of Florida.
On the table again this spring will be the issue of how teachers are paid and evaluated. Sen. Stephen Wise, R-Jacksonville, has introduced a bill -- co-sponsored by Sen. Evelyn Lynn, R-Ormond Beach -- that would tie 50 percent of a teacher's evaluation to student growth on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. The legislation would also get rid of tenure for new teachers and provide performance pay for those hired after July 2014 who are rated highly effective or teach in a school that is low-income or under-performing.
The legislation is similar to the controversial Senate Bill 6 that was vetoed by Gov. Charlie Crist after outcry from teachers last year, including hundreds who attended a protest rally in DeLand. It also has some similarities to the evaluation plan outlined in the state's Race to the Top application, the $4.35 billion U.S. Department of Education competition that Florida and 10 other states, and the District of Columbia, won last year.
Wise and others supporting his legislation believe the state, with a new governor and Republican-controlled Legislature, is ready to take up the issue again. If passed, Florida would join a handful of other states that have enacted reforms tying teacher pay and evaluations to test scores and weakening the protections of tenure.
Volusia School Board Member Candace Lankford and Volusia Teachers Organization President Andrew Spar said the bill, if passed, would short circuit collaboration between school officials and teachers unions on how to improve the teacher evaluation system in a fair way. The Volusia Teachers Organization received a $125,000 American Federation of Teachers grant to work with school district officials on ways to incorporate student performance into the teacher evaluation system.
They've been researching the issue for months now and plan to pilot a new evaluation system at 14 Volusia schools next year.
"The single most important piece is to find an evaluation system everyone sees as fair," said Lankford, who's also president of the Florida School Boards Association. "It cannot be one test, one day."
Lankford said the best approach is taking the time to develop an evaluation system with "teacher buy-in" and then try it out on a pilot basis to identify any glitches that need to be fixed before applying it across the school district.
"No one is saying we want to maintain the status quo," Lankford said, but such a phase-in of changes is preferable to an overnight mandate from lawmakers.
"This is nothing more than wealthy, elite powerbrokers telling local communities what to do," Spar said of the Senate proposal. He predicted the bill would increase testing and pressure on students if passed and cause many talented teachers to leave the profession.
Flagler County school officials have also worked with its teachers' union to develop evaluation and compensation systems based on student achievement.
But Board Member Colleen Conklin said she's concerned about the bill for several reasons, including the expense of implementing the changes.
Flagler County teachers do not have tenure. Instead, they have professional service contracts that allow principals to remove teachers if they follow a due process.
Conklin said it's also unclear how teachers in non-core subjects like music or art will be evaluated.
Using testing to evaluate teachers becomes "a slippery slope," she said.
"Students come to us with all sorts of needs," Conklin said. "It becomes very difficult when you are judging someone's entire career on that one issue of a single test."
But she said she appreciates the desire to link student performance to their instructors' evaluations.
"I think if there's a way to come up with a fair tool to use to show student growth that any good teacher would embrace that," Conklin said. "The problem is that it's Pandora's box. How do you find a fair academic evaluation tool that will assess student growth?"
Teacher merit pay is being pushed by the Obama administration and a number of lawmakers around the country, but the verdict is still out on how it works most effectively -- and whether it has an effect on student achievement, at all.
A three-year study by Vanderbilt University's National Center on Performance Incentives found that offering big bonuses to teachers failed to raise students' test scores. Teachers in the metropolitan Nashville school system who were offered bonuses of up to $15,000 a year had the same gains on standardized tests as those without the incentive.
But supporters of loosening tenure and tightening teacher accountability say the current laws are too lax.
Any changes will take place in the backdrop of cuts to education spending, as federal stimulus and jobs money dries up. Volusia schools stand to lose $35 million in federal stimulus money, while Flagler will lose $7 million.
Under Gov. Rick Scott's proposed budget, spending would decline by at least $300 per student and as much as $700. That will leave districts with the difficult task of trying to meet the state's class-size amendment with less money for teacher salaries. Lawmakers are again expected to take up legislation that would make the class-size rules more flexible.
Major cuts to school budgets as federal stimulus funding dries up. Tying teacher evaluations to student performance on standardized tests. Expanding vouchers and virtual school programs.
The legislative session that starts March 8 is likely to be pivotal in shaping the future of education in Volusia and Flagler counties and the rest of Florida.
On the table again this spring will be the issue of how teachers are paid and evaluated. Sen. Stephen Wise, R-Jacksonville, has introduced a bill -- co-sponsored by Sen. Evelyn Lynn, R-Ormond Beach -- that would tie 50 percent of a teacher's evaluation to student growth on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. The legislation would also get rid of tenure for new teachers and provide performance pay for those hired after July 2014 who are rated highly effective or teach in a school that is low-income or under-performing.
The legislation is similar to the controversial Senate Bill 6 that was vetoed by Gov. Charlie Crist after outcry from teachers last year, including hundreds who attended a protest rally in DeLand. It also has some similarities to the evaluation plan outlined in the state's Race to the Top application, the $4.35 billion U.S. Department of Education competition that Florida and 10 other states, and the District of Columbia, won last year.
Wise and others supporting his legislation believe the state, with a new governor and Republican-controlled Legislature, is ready to take up the issue again. If passed, Florida would join a handful of other states that have enacted reforms tying teacher pay and evaluations to test scores and weakening the protections of tenure.
Volusia School Board Member Candace Lankford and Volusia Teachers Organization President Andrew Spar said the bill, if passed, would short circuit collaboration between school officials and teachers unions on how to improve the teacher evaluation system in a fair way. The Volusia Teachers Organization received a $125,000 American Federation of Teachers grant to work with school district officials on ways to incorporate student performance into the teacher evaluation system.
They've been researching the issue for months now and plan to pilot a new evaluation system at 14 Volusia schools next year.
"The single most important piece is to find an evaluation system everyone sees as fair," said Lankford, who's also president of the Florida School Boards Association. "It cannot be one test, one day."
Lankford said the best approach is taking the time to develop an evaluation system with "teacher buy-in" and then try it out on a pilot basis to identify any glitches that need to be fixed before applying it across the school district.
"No one is saying we want to maintain the status quo," Lankford said, but such a phase-in of changes is preferable to an overnight mandate from lawmakers.
"This is nothing more than wealthy, elite powerbrokers telling local communities what to do," Spar said of the Senate proposal. He predicted the bill would increase testing and pressure on students if passed and cause many talented teachers to leave the profession.
Flagler County school officials have also worked with its teachers' union to develop evaluation and compensation systems based on student achievement.
But Board Member Colleen Conklin said she's concerned about the bill for several reasons, including the expense of implementing the changes.
Flagler County teachers do not have tenure. Instead, they have professional service contracts that allow principals to remove teachers if they follow a due process.
Conklin said it's also unclear how teachers in non-core subjects like music or art will be evaluated.
Using testing to evaluate teachers becomes "a slippery slope," she said.
"Students come to us with all sorts of needs," Conklin said. "It becomes very difficult when you are judging someone's entire career on that one issue of a single test."
But she said she appreciates the desire to link student performance to their instructors' evaluations.
"I think if there's a way to come up with a fair tool to use to show student growth that any good teacher would embrace that," Conklin said. "The problem is that it's Pandora's box. How do you find a fair academic evaluation tool that will assess student growth?"
Teacher merit pay is being pushed by the Obama administration and a number of lawmakers around the country, but the verdict is still out on how it works most effectively -- and whether it has an effect on student achievement, at all.
A three-year study by Vanderbilt University's National Center on Performance Incentives found that offering big bonuses to teachers failed to raise students' test scores. Teachers in the metropolitan Nashville school system who were offered bonuses of up to $15,000 a year had the same gains on standardized tests as those without the incentive.
But supporters of loosening tenure and tightening teacher accountability say the current laws are too lax.
Any changes will take place in the backdrop of cuts to education spending, as federal stimulus and jobs money dries up. Volusia schools stand to lose $35 million in federal stimulus money, while Flagler will lose $7 million.
Under Gov. Rick Scott's proposed budget, spending would decline by at least $300 per student and as much as $700. That will leave districts with the difficult task of trying to meet the state's class-size amendment with less money for teacher salaries. Lawmakers are again expected to take up legislation that would make the class-size rules more flexible.
Senate Bill 736
FEA President, Andy Ford
I am a Florida public school teacher and a parent. Like many others, I am following this year’s Legislation closely. Each day, I am approached by fellow teachers and parents who are also trying to understand what is going on with all the bills that are hitting our House and Senate. One bill in particular, Senate Bill 736, is a serious worry to many. So, I did what I would recommend of my students: I printed, read, highlighted, sticky-noted, and outlined the bill. I must tell you, at 47 pages long, it was no easy matter..
The bill is full of so many generalities, it is difficult to understand. So, I sought advice. I sent a few questions to Andy Ford, President of FEA, Florida Education Association. He promptly responded, and at length, addressing each of my questions. His answers were very informative. Here is an excerpt of his reply (quoted with his permission):
“All teachers and parents need to see SB736 is a “slightly lighter” version of SB6. It guts local control, expands testing, bases employment decisions on student test data and eliminates due process for all new teachers, teachers opting for the new performance salary schedules, and a teacher relocating to a new district…this bill is wrong for students, teachers, and public schools. Add to that the list of anti-union bills and budget cuts and this is setting up to be a disaster for kids! Silence the opposition seems to be the agenda.” ~Andy Ford, President FEA
Disaster for kids is right.
I know folks like to call our union leaders ‘thugs’. Why? Well, apparently, intelligence is intimidating. I can tell you this – with the threats to our Florida Constitution that these bills propose, we should all be so lucky as to have a few Andy Fords sticking up for us.
I am a Florida public school teacher and a parent. Like many others, I am following this year’s Legislation closely. Each day, I am approached by fellow teachers and parents who are also trying to understand what is going on with all the bills that are hitting our House and Senate. One bill in particular, Senate Bill 736, is a serious worry to many. So, I did what I would recommend of my students: I printed, read, highlighted, sticky-noted, and outlined the bill. I must tell you, at 47 pages long, it was no easy matter..
The bill is full of so many generalities, it is difficult to understand. So, I sought advice. I sent a few questions to Andy Ford, President of FEA, Florida Education Association. He promptly responded, and at length, addressing each of my questions. His answers were very informative. Here is an excerpt of his reply (quoted with his permission):
“All teachers and parents need to see SB736 is a “slightly lighter” version of SB6. It guts local control, expands testing, bases employment decisions on student test data and eliminates due process for all new teachers, teachers opting for the new performance salary schedules, and a teacher relocating to a new district…this bill is wrong for students, teachers, and public schools. Add to that the list of anti-union bills and budget cuts and this is setting up to be a disaster for kids! Silence the opposition seems to be the agenda.” ~Andy Ford, President FEA
Disaster for kids is right.
I know folks like to call our union leaders ‘thugs’. Why? Well, apparently, intelligence is intimidating. I can tell you this – with the threats to our Florida Constitution that these bills propose, we should all be so lucky as to have a few Andy Fords sticking up for us.
Mothers for education
At the same time we are cutting education we are giving billions away in tax breaks. -cpg
Why teachers and destroying the country, John Stewart style
It would have been funnier if that wasn't how teachers were actually being treated. For the record I have a 96 Explorer with a cracked windsheild. -cpg
Northeast Florida, where public education died
Northeast Florida if you wanted to destroy education, knee cap the middle class and do harm to the state you have come up aces. Embrace what you have done; own it, because if we get much more of Wise, Thrasher and Scott that will be about all you do own, it’s definitely all your children will.
Congratulations Northeast Florida, you are the epicenter for the destruction of the state’s public schools. Your recent dogged insistence to vote against you and your children’s interests and for politicians that couldn’t care less about the both of you have signaled education’s death knell. When you voted for Steven Wise, John Thrasher and Rick Scott you may as well as put a stake through education’s heart and forks in our children, because they too like our schools are done.
Steven Wise is no friend of public education and this has been made more evident by his senate bill 736 or what he laughably calls the teacher quality bill. In his bill teachers become at will employees and can be fired regardless of performance. Speak up? You’re gone. The principal doesn’t like you? You’re gone. The principal’s neighbor has a nephew who thinks he might like to try teaching because it would be cool to have summers off? You’re gone. This not increased quality, is what senate bill 736 will allow to happen. It also gets rid of pay increases for advanced degrees. I hope this irony is not lost on you. In every profession we say the more education you get the better off you will be, every profession except education that is, and it also gets rid of seniority and due process, two of the long established tenants of education.
The bill is also another unfunded mandate. School districts will be required to come up with ways to finance the various teacher salary scales and all the increased testing that the bill calls for. Kids will be taught more to the test than ever because now a teacher’s job is on the line more than ever. These tests are not just going to magically appear. They will be developed and scored by educational testing companies who will drain much needed money away from schools coffers and reap millions in profits. Then there will also be teacher evaluation systems that has Michelle Rhee and others salivating. Oh you didn’t know Michelle Rhee has a teacher evaluation system. Why she does, it’s called IMPACT and it has widely been panned in Washington D.C. which means it is probably on the fast track to Florida; after all she is the darling of Rick Scott and Wise.
Steven Wise has cloaked the bill in simplistic easy to please statements like merit pay and reward our best teachers. He doesn’t mention that teachers, who may know better what’s best for them than he does are overwhelmingly against it. His bill is like giving doctors who didn’t ask for it a clump or dirt and saying it’s a cutting edge scalpel and they must use it. Wise also doesn’t mention that there is no study that says merit pay works. Not one! In fact all the studies say it is the equivalent of the luck of the draw. Teacher’s student’s success on standardized tests varies wildly as students enter and leave their classes.
Wise says he wants to improve education, my question is how? Is it by making teachers want to leave and replacements harder to attract because that is what his bill is really doing; hey Jacksonville great job in voting for him.
Then there is John Thrasher who makes no apologies for his distain, no make that hatred for teachers and their unions and he comes from St. Johns County which is the top school district in the state, thank goodness he didn’t come from a county lower on the list. Wake up St. Johns, his way of thinking is going to hurt the schools and kids in your county as well but I guess some of you didn’t think about that while shooting nine at the country club. Would Deborah Giannoulis really have been such a bad alternative? She ran on a platform of doing what’s best for our kids, Thrasher has a history of doing what’s not.
He wants to end collective bargaining and destroy workers rights. He wants to do this by ending payroll deductions for unions but at the same time continue to allow payroll deductions for the United Way and other organizations and by decertifying unions that have a membership of less than fifty percent plus one. Why should multi-million or billion dollar corporations, his friends and supporters be the only one with a voice in government? In the end all his bill amounts to is rewarding his friends and silencing his enemies. Even if you don’t like unions, is this the America you want to live in? Do you want to live in a country where our corporate over loads tell us what to think and feel and limit the earning power of millions of everyday citizens; if so communist Russia would have been the place for you. This is not just a teacher battle here, this is a battle for the future of the middle class and if we are going to have one or not. Way to go St. Johns, you have just destroyed the teaching profession and public education but potentially the middle class as well, talk about a trifecta.
Thrasher and Wise are so concerned about education that instead of demanding Scott rescind his draconian budget, they develop bills that will handicap and set back the profession. No thanks guys and don’t worry about me I’ll try and get somebody to pull the knife out of my and the thousands of teachers back you just put it in.
Then there is Rick Scott, he of the 1.7 billion dollar fine for fraud who won the election with less than fifty percent of the vote, which was more of a referendum against Obama than for him. You have to hand it to him though, while spending eighty million dollars of his own personal fortune he made the election about Washington D.C. not about Florida. I get it that you don’t like Obammacare but how do you feel about gutting social services for the sick, disabled and children. How do you feel about him curtailing protections for the environment and our rivers and how do you feel about him cutting billions from our already resource starved education system? Friends we were already fiftieth in the nation. He and this is adjusted for inflation, wants to send us back to 1976 levels of school spending, you know before all the unfunded mandates and changes to education that siphoned millions away to corporate charter schools, vouchers and education testing companies.
North East Florida voted for this transplant and while hoping to create additional tax breaks for corporations and wealthy individuals in addition to the billions we already give, he seeks to balance the budget on the backs of the working poor and the middle class. Cut your own throat much North East Florida.
He won by saying he would create jobs, well the tens of thousands of teachers and government workers who are about to find themselves unemployed aren’t so optimistic about his plan. And friends we are already a low tax, pro business state without an income tax. If companies aren’t rushing here now do you really thing they are going to do so after we destroy public education, curtail government services and harm the environment?
Northeast Florida once again, if you wanted to destroy education, knee cap the middle class and do harm to the state you have come up aces. Embrace what you have done; own it, because if we get much more of Wise, Thrasher and Scott that will be about all you do, it’s definitely all your children will.
Congratulations Northeast Florida, you are the epicenter for the destruction of the state’s public schools. Your recent dogged insistence to vote against you and your children’s interests and for politicians that couldn’t care less about the both of you have signaled education’s death knell. When you voted for Steven Wise, John Thrasher and Rick Scott you may as well as put a stake through education’s heart and forks in our children, because they too like our schools are done.
Steven Wise is no friend of public education and this has been made more evident by his senate bill 736 or what he laughably calls the teacher quality bill. In his bill teachers become at will employees and can be fired regardless of performance. Speak up? You’re gone. The principal doesn’t like you? You’re gone. The principal’s neighbor has a nephew who thinks he might like to try teaching because it would be cool to have summers off? You’re gone. This not increased quality, is what senate bill 736 will allow to happen. It also gets rid of pay increases for advanced degrees. I hope this irony is not lost on you. In every profession we say the more education you get the better off you will be, every profession except education that is, and it also gets rid of seniority and due process, two of the long established tenants of education.
The bill is also another unfunded mandate. School districts will be required to come up with ways to finance the various teacher salary scales and all the increased testing that the bill calls for. Kids will be taught more to the test than ever because now a teacher’s job is on the line more than ever. These tests are not just going to magically appear. They will be developed and scored by educational testing companies who will drain much needed money away from schools coffers and reap millions in profits. Then there will also be teacher evaluation systems that has Michelle Rhee and others salivating. Oh you didn’t know Michelle Rhee has a teacher evaluation system. Why she does, it’s called IMPACT and it has widely been panned in Washington D.C. which means it is probably on the fast track to Florida; after all she is the darling of Rick Scott and Wise.
Steven Wise has cloaked the bill in simplistic easy to please statements like merit pay and reward our best teachers. He doesn’t mention that teachers, who may know better what’s best for them than he does are overwhelmingly against it. His bill is like giving doctors who didn’t ask for it a clump or dirt and saying it’s a cutting edge scalpel and they must use it. Wise also doesn’t mention that there is no study that says merit pay works. Not one! In fact all the studies say it is the equivalent of the luck of the draw. Teacher’s student’s success on standardized tests varies wildly as students enter and leave their classes.
Wise says he wants to improve education, my question is how? Is it by making teachers want to leave and replacements harder to attract because that is what his bill is really doing; hey Jacksonville great job in voting for him.
Then there is John Thrasher who makes no apologies for his distain, no make that hatred for teachers and their unions and he comes from St. Johns County which is the top school district in the state, thank goodness he didn’t come from a county lower on the list. Wake up St. Johns, his way of thinking is going to hurt the schools and kids in your county as well but I guess some of you didn’t think about that while shooting nine at the country club. Would Deborah Giannoulis really have been such a bad alternative? She ran on a platform of doing what’s best for our kids, Thrasher has a history of doing what’s not.
He wants to end collective bargaining and destroy workers rights. He wants to do this by ending payroll deductions for unions but at the same time continue to allow payroll deductions for the United Way and other organizations and by decertifying unions that have a membership of less than fifty percent plus one. Why should multi-million or billion dollar corporations, his friends and supporters be the only one with a voice in government? In the end all his bill amounts to is rewarding his friends and silencing his enemies. Even if you don’t like unions, is this the America you want to live in? Do you want to live in a country where our corporate over loads tell us what to think and feel and limit the earning power of millions of everyday citizens; if so communist Russia would have been the place for you. This is not just a teacher battle here, this is a battle for the future of the middle class and if we are going to have one or not. Way to go St. Johns, you have just destroyed the teaching profession and public education but potentially the middle class as well, talk about a trifecta.
Thrasher and Wise are so concerned about education that instead of demanding Scott rescind his draconian budget, they develop bills that will handicap and set back the profession. No thanks guys and don’t worry about me I’ll try and get somebody to pull the knife out of my and the thousands of teachers back you just put it in.
Then there is Rick Scott, he of the 1.7 billion dollar fine for fraud who won the election with less than fifty percent of the vote, which was more of a referendum against Obama than for him. You have to hand it to him though, while spending eighty million dollars of his own personal fortune he made the election about Washington D.C. not about Florida. I get it that you don’t like Obammacare but how do you feel about gutting social services for the sick, disabled and children. How do you feel about him curtailing protections for the environment and our rivers and how do you feel about him cutting billions from our already resource starved education system? Friends we were already fiftieth in the nation. He and this is adjusted for inflation, wants to send us back to 1976 levels of school spending, you know before all the unfunded mandates and changes to education that siphoned millions away to corporate charter schools, vouchers and education testing companies.
North East Florida voted for this transplant and while hoping to create additional tax breaks for corporations and wealthy individuals in addition to the billions we already give, he seeks to balance the budget on the backs of the working poor and the middle class. Cut your own throat much North East Florida.
He won by saying he would create jobs, well the tens of thousands of teachers and government workers who are about to find themselves unemployed aren’t so optimistic about his plan. And friends we are already a low tax, pro business state without an income tax. If companies aren’t rushing here now do you really thing they are going to do so after we destroy public education, curtail government services and harm the environment?
Northeast Florida once again, if you wanted to destroy education, knee cap the middle class and do harm to the state you have come up aces. Embrace what you have done; own it, because if we get much more of Wise, Thrasher and Scott that will be about all you do, it’s definitely all your children will.
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