Florida Teachers Beware: 'Son of S.B. 6' Coming Soon

John Koenig, who holds out against the internet savages at FloridaThinks.com ("The forum for civil debate") is warning public school teachers that Charlie "Crist's Veto May Only Delay the Inevitable."

The advocates of Senate Bill 6 – the Legislature’s Republican leadership, former Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida’s major business organizations – are not going away. They will continue to fight for merit pay and an end to teacher tenure long after Crist is out of office.

That is no doubt true. As Koenig admits almost everyone on the planet is "advocating greater accountability from schools and teachers." Yesterday's veto, he says, "only buys teachers a bit of time to come up with their own accountability proposals."

Along the way, he shares an interesting anecdote:

[E]ven for the private sector, performance-incentive programs are tricky. Basing them on too few variables or the wrong variables can lead to counterproductive results.

Consider this story from Fast Company magazine. Ken O’Brien was an NFL quarterback in the 1980s and ‘90s who threw a lot of interceptions. In an attempt to improve his performance, the owners of the team on which he played put a clause into his contract docking his paycheck for each interception. The next year, O’Brien threw fewer inceptions. But that was because he threw the ball hardly at all. The net effect: The team did no better.

The article Koenig refers to has more "incentive pay" horror stories. As if we needed them after Wall Street's investment bank geniuses brought the world to the brink just so they could snag their multimillion dollar "performance bonuses."

For example, there's Ma Bell, who "tried to encourage productivity by paying programmers based on the number of lines of code they produced. The result: programs of Proustian length." There's Merrill Lynch (R.I.P.) whose pay program so deeply discouraged a young novice from getting sage advice from his seniors that he wound up writing a scorching best-selling expose whose title tells it all: "Riding the Bull: My Year in the Madness at Merrill Lynch."

All this talk about incentive pay for public school teachers draws on the supposed lessons of the private business sector. That misses a couple of very big points.

First, of course, is the fact that the tax payers and politicians, perversely, refuse to pay elementary and secondary school teachers -- who are the most important front in educating our children to read, calculate and think -- anywhere near what the private sector forks over to CEOs, corporate executives, fraud artists, scammers, cheats, quacks, stupid celebrities, and assorted mountebanks and desk-warmers whom they hire to turn a buck. As a society, if we really valued what teachers do we'd pay them accordingly. Instead, we pay Corporate America like royalty but expect teachers to work for love of the job.

Second, where do the parents fit into this picture? Sad to say, over the decades we've heaped more and more responsibilities onto the schools while parents -- many forced to become two-earner families because of the growing gap from top to bottom in private sector employment -- abandon their responsibilities to give vital educational support in the home.

All that said, the political reality is that Koenig is right. "Son of S.B. 6" is coming soon to a legislature near you. Florida teachers need to come up with their own detailed, rational answer to it. Call it a "pay-incentive" plan, if you have to, but make it as real as possible.

Then challenge the legislators to fund it.

Dept. of Related Blogistry

Governor Crist Does 'The Right Thing'
April 15, 2010
Florida's 'Disappear the Teachers' Bill
April 9, 2010
The Christian Student Veto Bill
March 19, 2010
Lying to Our Kids
March 2, 2010
Teacher of the Year
January 30, 2010
Crazy People and School Administrators
Sept. 8, 2009
The One and Only Faith
Aug. 5, 2009
Suffer the Little Children...
Feb. 21, 2009
School Super 'Censured'
Jan. 28, 2008
Florida Fraud Files
Dec. 2, 2007
Minor edit 4-16 am

Florida's 'Disappear the Teachers' Bill

"Even hamburger flippers at McDonald's have better job security than this."

The Republican-dominated legislature in Tallahassee has just come up with a scheme to completely ruin public education for the state's children. Two bills passed yesterday. They are now on their way to the Governor for signature or veto. Both are classic examples of political hypocrisy mixed with rank stupidity.

Never mind how Horace Mann taught the world a hundred and fifty years ago that excellence in public education is essential to the health of a democratic republic. There is no better way than these two bills to drive away from Florida young working families with children and cutting-edge technology industries with high-paying jobs.

First, the legislature proposes to clear the way for increasing class size. Essentially, this bill would upend a voter-initiated constitutional amendment which passed over the objections of many Republican legislators just eight years ago.

The three-fifths vote by both chambers gets the measure on the ballot in November and reopens a passionate campaign that has long pitted public school teachers and parents against school administrators and Republican lawmakers who say current class-size limits are impossible to fund.
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The constitution currently limits class sizes to 18 students in grades pre-kindergarten through third, 22 students in fourth through eighth and 25 students in high school. Superintendents have been allowed to meet those caps first by district and now by school averages, but the constitution requires a shift toward hard classroom counts starting in July.

The proposed amendment would forgo hard caps in favor of maintaining school averages and would increase the maximum class size limit by three students in pre-kindergarten through third, and by five in other grades.

As Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association, says, "They just don't want to pay for schools."

Second, legislators passed S.B. 6, or the so-called 'pay-for-performance' bill. It should be called the "Disappear the Teachers" bill. The St. Petersburg Times has a useful summary.

Under this horror:

• All public school teachers would serve a five year "probationary period." What this means is that even the very best of them would be assured of a job only on a day-to-day basis for five years. Any teachers could be laid off at any time for any reason or no reason at all, with no warning. Even hamburger flippers at McDonald's have better job security than this.
  
• Teachers who survive those five years then can be offered only "single-year contracts." Good grief! We give legislators better deals than that, and most of them don't know algebra from Albania.
  
• Regardless of a teacher's individual merit, half their pay would be linked to the results of student tests. Teachers assigned to chronically under-funded schools -- many of them in inner city neighborhoods or rural areas which have an abundance of families who devalue education or suffer economic hardship -- would suffer lower pay. Those with connections that get them into tonier schools -- where many students have sufficient intellectual support at home to teach themselves -- get the raises.
• As for those "student tests," every school district would be required to "find or create" a standardized final test "for every subject in every grade." As the St. Pete Times points out, "Many districts would need hundreds of new tests. And they'd be high-stakes, with teacher salaries and future employment riding on the outcome, beginning in 2014-15."
• One-time bonuses for those dedicated teachers who on their own study for and pass all requirements for National Board certification would be forbidden after 2013. How much sense does this make? A proven, nationwide teacher certification system often used for paying small one-time bonuses is thrown overboard for locally-developed tests, many of which don't even exist yet? This can only be understood as a mean-spirited poke-in-the-eye to public school teachers.
  
• Districts that don't comply with all this insanity would be penalized by state funding cuts and "requirements to raise local taxes." The legal implications of this are breath-taking enough; almost certainly, it won't survive challenges under the federal and state constitutions. But the notion that public schools, which are in many cases under-funded to begin with, would be "punished" for poor test results by cutting their funding is completely daft.
  
• Districts would be required to set aside "up to 5 percent of their budget" starting next year "for performance and differential pay increases." Or, for those districts headed by administrators just as pencil-headed as our legislature, they are authorized to use much of the money "to develop tests to determine student gains."

At best, what this bill does is load all of the incentives, parsimonious as they are, into the absolute worst kind of pedagogy: "teaching to the test." Tests which in most cases haven't even been developed yet! At worst, these two bills will drive all the good teachers and administrators away, leaving behind only those who are among the worst, the least imaginative, or completely unemployable.

Everyone knows that Florida's school system suffers from chronic sickness. It ranks very poorly in comparison with other states, especially those of comparable population. Past legislatures have a lot to do with that. They've starved the public schools of adequate funding for years while trying to lavish funds on mostly religious private schools.

Yes, the Florida school system is sick. But what this year's Florida legislature has just done is to fashion an "arsenic cure" that will kill it. As the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss puts it, Senate Bill 6 is a "disaster for teachers" and the damage done by both bills is "incalculable."

Both bills are a disgrace. Governor Crist must veto them. Then the voters should fire the legislators who flunked the test by voting for this abomination.

Dept. of Related Blogistry

Governor Crist Does 'The Right Thing'
April 15, 2010
Florida's 'Disappear the Teachers' Bill
April 9, 2010
Lying to Our Kids
March 2, 2010
Teacher of the Year
January 30, 2010
Crazy People and School Administrators
Sept. 8, 2009
The One and Only Faith
Aug. 5, 2009
Suffer the Little Children...
Feb. 21, 2009
School Super 'Censured'
Jan. 28, 2008
Florida Fraud Files
Dec. 2, 2007

Florida Education Evolves

The New York Times, March 6:

Has Florida come to its senses over the teaching of evolution? Sound science appears to be winning the latest round, but the struggle isn’t over.
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Some anti-evolutionists are now pushing Florida’s Legislature to step in and allow the teaching of alternative explanations of biological origins. The alternatives that they have in mind would almost certainly not be deemed “scientific” and would have no legitimate place in science classes.

If the standards are strictly followed, Florida may finally be on the way toward improving the quality of its science curriculum and the subpar performance of its students in national assessments.

Vote for Darwin by Friday

Every time someone tries to drag Florida's miserably vague educational science standards into the 20th century -- never mind the 21st century -- the creationist lunkheads rise up to drag it back again to Bishop Usher's famously bogus date of 4004 B.C.

Any and every hominid in the world has through Friday, October 14 to cast his or her vote for the newly proposed Florida science standards at this polling place. A vote for the new standards is a vote proving that Florida at long last has evolved. Darwin would be proud.