If you live in Florida, take a moment to send an email or to call your Florida House and Senate reps and tell them that House Bill 7189 ( and Senate Bill 6) is a BAD idea. These bills are being railroaded through Tallahassee with little time for public debate or input and are a concentrated effort to undermine the teaching profession in Florida.
** Find your legislators: HERE or HERE
** Call and email the office of Speaker Larry Cretul at larry.cretul@myfloridahouse.gov and 850.488.1450 to let him know you oppose SB 6 and HB 7189.
The most public facet of these bills deals with merit pay for teachers which, on the surface, might seem like a fair idea, but it is not. Tying a teachers’ pay to one test eliminates all the learning that goes on in a classroom over the course of a year that is not quantifiable and doesn’t always come to bear fruit in one year’s time and ignores the richness of a well-rounded curriculum. Our students are becoming quite adept at bubbling with a #2 pencil, but can they think outside that bubble? To think that one teacher is solely responsible for how a student does on an end of the year standardized test is ludicrous to say the least. Students are not widgets that all end up the same at the end.
These bills also ignore all the extraneous factors that are beyond a teacher’s control over student performance such as chronic absenteeism, lack of enforced discipline, student apathy, students who float from school to school, etc, not to mention, home factors that our students bring into the classroom everyday like domestic violence, hunger, and homelessness. A student that is worried about where their dinner will come from, where they will sleep, or if mom/dad is going to fight IS NOT too concerned about pg 12 homework being due. I can give you MANY examples from my real-life classroom illustrating any of these issues…. They are not isolated and rare happenings, but things that go on every day. These bills will make it increasingly difficult to staff schools with struggling students or an abundance of the aforementioned issues and we all know that not all schools can be compared apples-to-apples because of location, student and parent demographics, etc. Ultimately, instruction is already becoming more and more scripted to a test because of federal and state mandates that subtract from innovation and rigorous instruction….these bills will only increase the “bottled” curriculum developing in many areas thanks to FCAT. Florida’s students deserve so much more!
The legislators talk about merit pay (of which no additional funding is being provided of course!) being based on “learning gains”, but in reality it will trickle down to a summary of passing/failing students. Only three areas are tested on FCAT (which is not a reliable method for testing learning gains, nor is any SINGLE test). What about the other classes taught in our schools? The legislators mention creating end-of-course exams ..... as yet to be determined who and how they will be created or where the funding will come from to do so. This is faulty logic to say the least. To measure gains, a student would have had to have an identical, but lower level, course the previous year in which to compare it to. How can one assess learning gains from a class such as 8th grade US History in which no identical 7th grade course exists? So in these areas, it will most likely be ‘How many passed the exam’, not a measure of improvement over time....aka learning gains. These murky ‘learning gains’ will also determine if a teaching certificate is renewed. How many do you think will volunteer to work with our ESE, ESOL, or low level kids?
House Bill 7189 and Senate Bill 6 also have provisions to enforce a “one-size-fits-all” approach to education allowing Tallahassee to dictate what is best for Marion County students. (The Florida Constitution provides for salary, benefits and working conditions to be negotiated on the local level, not imposed by the state.) These bills remove “tenure” for teachers that protects us from the whims and fancies of administration (Yes, we have administrators out there that act like mini-Napoleon’s!) and eliminates due process if a problem or dispute arises. A teacher can be let go at the end of each year for ANY reason or even for NO reason at all. In reality, my district has no 'tenure' as the word implies. Yes, we have professional contracts that provide us with a means to protect ourselves against frivolous disagreements with administration, but there is a concrete method of removing a truly bad teacher regardless if they hold one of these or not.
These bills ignore the years of experience a teacher holds or higher-level degrees they have earned. These bills effectively are meant to bring the union to its knees(and U-N-I-O-N is NOT a dirty word) by removing much of its collective bargaining abilities that only serve to protect teachers from an ever increasing litigious society and ensuring our working conditions comply to federal and state law. Ask me about my 15 minute lunch or non-existent ability to use the restroom during the school day..…
Senate Bill 6 has already passed the Senate by 21-17. The Florida House of Representatives is up next with bill 7189. They have scheduled a public hearing for Monday, April 5th which is smack dab in the middle of Spring Break for many. This timing is no coincidence! Senate Bill 6 just happened to be discussion publicly in the middle of the ever important (insert sarcasm there) FCAT when a vast number people were unable to turn out in opposition.
This insanity must be STOPPED. We wouldn’t expect our police officers to be paid based on an area’s crime rate. We wouldn’t expect a firefighter to be paid based on the number of structures saved from fire. In addition, our very own legislators aren’t paid based on constituent satisfaction or voter turnout! Why should we expect different salary treatment for our teachers?
Stay tuned....
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