Dogan's Diagnosis

Pensacola's newspaper columnist Reginald Dogan does the Pulitzer Prize winning Miami columnist Leonard Pitts one better today. Back in February, Pitts published his view of the Tea Party movement. He called it "nuanced." We thought it was excessively charitable:

The tea party people distrust Obama's policies, his eloquence, his fierce intelligence and the fact that he is black then becomes the final straw, the difference maker and deal breaker. To put that another way: I doubt most of the tea partiers hate Obama strictly because he is black, but it sure doesn't help.

Today Dogan, to his credit, comes right out and says what needs to be said:

Many of the tea partiers, I believe, are seething because, for the first time in American history, a black man is in the White House. I'm convinced that race is a subtext of the tea party movement.

The distinctions between those two views may be a fine one, but it's there nevertheless. Leonard Pitts acknowledges the teabaggers "distrust" of President Obama's policies and "fierce intelligence" as if these were race-neutral standards; then he supposes their racism is merely "the final straw." Dogan, by contrast, cuts right to the quick: he sees racism as the one overwhelming constant that under-girds the Tea Party movement.

Perhaps the difference in views can be attributed to a difference in locale. No doubt, Miami seems to Pitts more urbane and accepting of racial diversity than Dogan's Pensacola. What Pitts sees among the Miami teabaggers are angry folks --

moved by something even bigger than race. This is race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, culture, and the fact that those who have always been on the right side, the power-wielding side, of one or more of those equations, now face the realization that their days of dominance are numbered.

What Dogan sees in the Pensacola teabaggers are hypocrites who --

moan about too much government control, unless, of course, the government wants to control something that they oppose, like same-sex marriage or leaving religion out of public schools.

They complain about President Obama taking away their civil liberties, but when President Bush trampled all over our civil liberties, they uttered not a mumbling word.

They called the recently passed health care legislation unconstitutional but said nothing about the Patriot Act and the suspension of habeas corpus by the Bush administration.

So many of them happily accept their government checks.

They rail against too much government, but they don't turn down their Social Security and Medicare benefits.

History and human psychology suggest Dogan has the keener insight. As David H. Bennett wrote in his detailed study of the long and sordid history of extremist right-wing political parties in America, "The Party of Fear", "the picture of the United States as a unique and gifted land, a garden of Eden that must be preserved against encroachment of sinners" has been the fountainhead of every anti-Quaker, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, and anti-black political movement in our history.

What tied these movements to one tradition was the common vision of alien intruders in the promised land -- people who could not be assimilated in the national community because of their religion or ethnicity.
* * *
If there has been political extremism of the Right in American history, it is found in large measure in these efforts to combat peoples and ideas that were seen as alien threats to a cherished but embattled American "way of life." The passionate men and women who joined the right-wing groups that sought to check various alien enemies became extremists when they violated democratic procedures and moved outside the norms of a democratic society. Seeing a vast conspiracy behind the invasion of strange and unpromising immigrants, the growth of an "authoritarian" church, and the appearance of an ideology dedicated to destroying traditional arrangements, they insisted that desperate times called for extraordinary measures, that saving America was worth paying any price. They were the leaders and members of the party of fear. As politicians of morality, they refused to treat those whom they feared with tolerance or civility. As moralists of the Right, they were idealists whose vision of utopia was in the past. They sought, as had other rightists, to preserve the old, idyllic order by purging the corrupting elements that menaced its values and perverted its institutions.

"America" is a dream from the past imperiled; it needs protectors to preserve its promise for future generations. Only idealists who see themselves as supreme patriots are willing to rise to its defense. That, at least, is what they seemed to be saying to anyone who would listen.

Hatred and fear of "the other" drives the Teabaggers as surely as it drove the Puritans who hung Quakers on Boston Common in the 18th century; the LocoFocos, Anti-Masonites, Know Nothings, and Southern Democrats of the first half of the 19th century; the Ku Klux Klan, anti-Semites, the "Americanization movement," and anti-Bolshevik movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and the John Birch Society and anti-community witch-hunts in the later decades of 20th century.

There is nothing new about the tea baggers. They are merely the latest iteration of a paranoid style of racist, xenophobic, Me-First types. We've seen them and felt the heat of their fear and hatred throughout our nation's history. As Dogan says, there's no reason to go see them today. It always ends badly.

Joseph Welch at the Army-McCarthy Hearings

Jospeh McCarthy was a bully.

So, too, is Senator Charles Grassley.

Grassley Echoes McCarthy As Holder Echoes Welch

Attorney General Eric Holder, to the reprehensible Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) April 14, 2010, after hearing Grassley smear Justice Department lawyers who as private attorneys had previously represented Guantanamo inmates:

"There has been an attempt to take the names of the people who represent Guantanamo detainees and to drag their reputations through the mud. There were reprehensible ads in essence to question their patriotism. I'm not going to allow these kids -- I'm not going to be a part of this effort."

"And so, with all due respect, their names are out there now. The positions that they hold are out there. That's all been placed in the public record. I'm simply not going to be a part of that effort. I would not allow good, decent lawyers who have followed the greatest traditions of American jurisprudence, done what John Adams did, done what our chief justice has said is appropriate. I will not allow their reputations to be besmirched. I will not be a part of that."

Boston lawyer Joseph Welch, to the equally reprehensible Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) June 9, 1954, after hearing McCarthy smear Fred Fisher, a young associate in Welch's firm, for having once belonged, when a law student, to the National Lawyer's Guild (from Eric F. Goldman's "The Crucial Decade and After"):

"Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us.

"When I decided to work for this committee [as lead attorney for the U.S. Army] I asked Jim St. Glair ... to be my first assistant. I said to Jim, 'Pick somebody in the firm who works under you that you would like.' He chose Fred Fisher and they came down on an afternoon plane. That night, when we had taken a little stab at trying to see what the case was about, Fred Fisher and Jim St. Clair and I went to dinner together. I then said to these two young men, 'Boys, I don't know anything about you except that I have always liked you, but if there is anything funny in the life of either one of you that would hurt anybody in this case you speak up quick.'

"Fred Fisher said, 'Mr. Welch, when I was in law school and for a period of months after, I belonged to the Lawyers Guild. I said, 'Fred, I just don't think I am going to ask you to work on the case. If I do, one of these days that will come out and go over national television and it will just hurt like the dickens.

"So Senator, I asked him to go back to Boston.

"Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true that he is still with Hale & Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale & Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I would do so. I like to think I am a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me."

Yelling at the Kids on the Social Security Lawn

Mark O'Brien is gearing up to start kicking kids off the grass which he expects to be growing soon in his own yard. On his newspaper blog, which seems to get even less editorial attention than his column, O'Brien is now endorsing the right-wing extremist, Marco Rubio (R-Teabagger) for governor U.S. Senator because "he favors raising the retirement age for people now 55 or younger. He also would change the way benefits are calculated."

O'Brien is a nice enough fellow on a personal level, but he's 61. He's as good as got his. He wants you to vote so you don't get yours. He'll make a terrific crabby old man.

The really sad thing about this endorsement by Mark is that he is manifestly clueless about the macro economics of the Social Security system. Which makes him an easy mark for the "decades of scare-mongering about Social Security’s future from conservative ideologues" as Pulitzer Prize winning economist Paul Krugman put it at the beginning of the last election cycle.

The Social Security system is not in crisis. Not even close. Another economist, Prof. Jason Furman, summarizes the facts:

• The Social Security actuaries project that in 2018, Social Security’s trust fund will hold $5.3 trillion in assets, in the form of U.S. Treasury bonds. Starting in that year, Social Security payroll tax collections will not be sufficient to cover the cost of all Social Security benefits, so the Social Security system will start to use a portion of the interest the trust fund earns on its bonds to cover the remaining benefit costs. The rest of the interest the trust fund earns will be reinvested in the trust fund. The actuaries project that as a result of these interest earnings, the trust fund’s assets will increase by another $1 trillion in the decade after 2018 and reach $6.6 trillion by 2028.
• Treasury bonds are the world’s most secure investment. They are the instruments that investors large and small, at home and abroad, turn to for safety, secure in the knowledge that the United States has never in its history defaulted on its bonds.
• The notion that the Treasury bonds which the trust fund holds are nothing but paper IOUs that may not be honored does not withstand scrutiny. Failure to honor Treasury bonds would result in a U.S. government default, and that likely would trigger an international financial crisis. As the New York Times editorialized on January 10, “If the trust fund’s Treasury securities are worthless, someone better tell investors throughout the world, who currently hold $4.3 trillion in Treasury debt that carries the exact same government obligation to pay as the trust fund securities.”
• The Social Security Trustees, a group that includes Treasury Secretary Snow and other Cabinet officials, project that the Social Security trust fund will be able to pay full benefits until 2042. At that point, the trust fund will be exhausted — that is, all of its bonds will have been redeemed. The Congressional Budget Office projects the trust fund will be able to pay full benefits until 2052.
• When the trust fund is exhausted, the Social Security system will not be “bankrupt.” It will continue to collect both payroll taxes and the income taxes levied on a portion of Social Security benefits. With these revenues, it will be able to pay about 70 percent of benefits according to the Social Security Trustees, and about 80 percent of benefits according to CBO.
• Finally, if one believes that Social Security faces a crisis in 2018, then converting part of Social Security to individual accounts would accelerate that crisis. According to the Social Security actuaries, the major individual account plan proposed by the President’s Social Security Commission (which is reported to be the principal plan the President is considering) would advance the date at which Social Security’s benefit costs exceed its non-interest income from 2018 to 2006. In other words, under that plan, Social Security would have to rely on interest from the trust fund to pay benefits starting next year.
  
  Furthermore, according to the actuaries, that plan would increase the federal debt by $10 trillion by 2030, an amount equal to 28 percent of GDP, substantially increasing the volume of Treasury bonds that the government has to finance.

As another economist explained recently, crisis-mongering about the Social Security system is "manufactured cynicism" which politicians too often use as a bogeyman to scare voters. Politicians exactly like Marco Rubio.

Social Security's surpluses have in fact helped to create an economy rich enough to support the retirements of the Baby Boomers, as well as the eventual retirements of their children and grandchildren. While we might choose in the future to adjust benefits and taxes, there is no reason to believe right now that the system is in trouble, either in the short term or the long term. And the headlines to the contrary are inaccurate and irresponsible.

The truth is that the compact between generations is being honored. To see that, we need only ignore all the scare-mongering, look at the facts, and realize that Social Security is working as it should.

As economist Richard DuBoff puts it--

Social Security is simply another claim on society's resources and production. Its future viability depends on how large the labor force will be, what fraction is employed, and how high the productivity of its workers will be--in other words, on how fast the output of goods and services grows in future decades.

The nation surely does face a long-term total budget deficit challenge -- arising mainly from chronic unrestrained military spending, corporate welfare, the infamous Bush tax cuts for the rich, and Wall Street bank rescues. But that is a very different problem and it requires very different solutions. Furthermore, it would be stupid to cut spending now in the midst of a deep recession.

Even if Social Security were truly facing a crisis -- and, as most economists say, it's isn't -- the simplest and most effective fix long has been obvious: eliminate the income cap on the Social Security tax and investment income.

Now, however, we're talking about walking on Mark O'Brien's lawn, again.
corrected 4-17

The Big Melt

Sure, it's difficult for some in Northwest Florida who suffered through an unusually cool, wet winter to appreciate that this past winter was the fifth warmest on record for Planet Earth. Indeed, the past decade was the "warmest decade ever."

But it's a big world. And in Peru, "home to 70 percent of the world's tropical ice fields,"that world is melting fast.

According to NASA, for the northern hemisphere, "combined land and ocean" temperatures for February, 2010, "tied with 2009 as the tenth warmest on record." For the southern hemisphere, it was the "warmest February on record."

The combined global land and ocean surface temperature during December 2009 - February 2010 ranked as the fifth warmest on record. During the three-month season, warmer-than-average temperatures engulfed much of the planet's surface, with the exception of anomalously cool conditions across Europe, western and central Russia, and most of the contiguous United States. The seasonal temperature for the worldwide land surface was the 13^th warmest December-February on record, 0.64°C (1.15°F) above the 20^th century average. Meanwhile, the worldwide ocean surface temperature had the second warmest December-February temperature on record, behind 1998.

It's a weakness of human nature to think that the weather is what we see outside our window. Reality is a great deal bigger than that.

One Good Tern Deserves Another

The inimitable Barrier Island Girl has been tracking the shore birds at Range Point. You also can view her entire portfolio over at Barrier Island Girl Photography , where many of her photos are available for purchase.

Zoo Scoop

When the troubled Northwest Florida Zoo was compelled to close late last year for want of funding support from local area governments, we suggested to some local journalists we encountered that it might make an interesting series perhaps under a headline like, "How Do You Evict the Animals from the House?"

Milton resident James Amerson (not pictured here) did exactly that, on his own. And, he's has posted a series of video reports on CNNi -- an interactive web site where viewers can submit news stories. It covers both the closing and the reopening of what is now known as the "Gulf Breeze Zoo."

For all of his video reports, CLICK HERE. (Sadly for Northwest Floridians, there are no more komodo dragons. They moved on to stardom at the Phoenix Zoo.)

But the Zoo is back! James Amerson's latest video shows the "soft re-opening" in late February and gives you a glimpse of what the newly renamed Gulf Breeze Zoo looks like now.

Fish Eye on the Beach

A good "fairy_star81" recently uploaded an unusual picture of Pensacola Beach, taken with a fish eye lens. Go here for an enlarged view.

Pollen Count

Paula of Pensacola, who endeavors to post a daily photo of the city, says judging by her windshield the pollen count is high. Have a closer look.

Pensacola Beach 'Master Plan' Meet Scheduled

Wednesday of this week, beginning at 5 pm, the Santa Rosa Island Authority's "Development and Leasing Committee" will hear "a presentation by EDSA for the final summary of the 'conceptual' Master Plan for the beautification of Pensacola Beach." Click here for the full agenda [pdf file].

Almost certainly this won't be the last time a "final summary" is presented by someone to someone. As the Gulf Breeze News reported last month, the proposed traffic round-abouts and elevated road "have been hotly debated" by residents as well as SRIA board members. It's also likely to become controversial at the county level.

Board member Dr. Thomas Campanella, elected to represent beach leaseholders, tells us he likes "some parts" of the conceptual plan developed by Ed Stone Associates. But he doubts engineers can find "enough room" for three traffic round-abouts plus an elevated roadway. Overall, he says, the plan is too expensive and "way over the top."

Campanella also says he'd like to see a plan that is more in keeping with an "Old Florida" conception. "A lot of tourists who come here for the first time," he says, "tell us they didn't realize there was anything left of the old Florida. They love it here. It's laid-back and not too aggressive or modern-looking. It reminds them of the way beaches were when they were kids coming to the beach with their parents."

There's considerable confusion, too, over whether the SRIA board hasn't been shoved aside by Escambia County. Early this month, interim county administrator Larry Newsom announced the county "is taking over the next phase" of the project. Newsom, who was the county's chief traffic engineer before being named interim administrator, will be present Wednesday to explain the county's next steps.

Pensacola's Maritime 'Pork': The Inside Story

A 2800-plus word interview with retired U.S. District judge Lacy Collier, who served for three years as volunteer chairman of the Maritime Park planning commission, appears above the fold in today's News Journal. ["Judge Speaks on Maritime Park Process"] Three things caught our eye.

1. Collier remains crabby and disdainful as ever over public input into the project. It may be some sort of a legal thing with him. "The Sunshine Law," he says, is "the most disastrous thing ever to come down the pike in terms of getting things done." Then he adds:
   

   It's like the lawsuit (against the board regarding the question of whether the public had a right to speak at CMPA meetings). Anybody who can understand the English language knows the Sunshine Law does not say anything about (public) participation at a meeting.

   Which misses the point, of course. Whether compelled by law or not, are there any serious arguments against listening to the public's views about a planned public park on public land which needed voters' approval and would be financed with public finds? Pettifoggery over what the law compels hardly is an answer. But as Collier, himself, says by now "that's just a sidelight."
   
   
2. Far more convincing is Collier's candid take that, "Unfortunately, the City Council has gone along with making this park, in my opinion, a commercial park and not a people's park."
   

   If you go back to the original (concept), you see limited commercial (on the north end of the project).
   * * *
   I don't care if there's never a (commercial) development on the property — because that was not the thing. We want people to have a restaurant to go to, and such things as that, but that was never, ever a primary goal in my mind for this project.
   

   It's pretty clear over-commercialization of the Maritime Park is why Judge Collier resigned as chairman of the commission: "I was unwilling to lead into a commercial park," he says, "and I certainly wasn't willing to follow into a commercial park, so that means get out of the way."
   


3. Finally, after 'sitting down' with him 'on several occasions' the judge developed a deep distrust in his "gut" for Jack Scott Davison. [corrected by reader] Davison is the private developer to whom the city has given the construction contract.
   

   One of the first things he told me was that the museum property needed to be "his," that it was the prime property on the site and was wasted on the museum. That to me was totally the wrong attitude; that was one of the three legs of the park and all of a sudden (he didn't want it).
   * * *
   And, of course, we hired (consultant) Owen Beitsch, paid him nearly 50 grand, and his recommendation was for the other (bidder). I put a great deal of faith in that.

Collier makes it crystal clear, too, that he is very skeptical about Davison and his ever-shifting corporate 'partners' and bond guarantors. The net worth of the individuals heading these companies, he points out, means nothing. The question is whether their corporate entities can get bonded. That should take a few hours, or days at worst. Instead, it's taken months -- and still no bond.

Running alongside the extended interview is a PNJ editorial that strikes a plaintive, very nearly desperate, tone ["The Same Old Pensacola?"]:

The Community Maritime Park is not about a baseball stadium, an amphitheater or a museum. It is not about New Market Tax Credits, bonds, developer funding, the MAGI Group, MPDP, retail stores, parking lots or the tents of the homeless.

It is not about Mike Wiggins, Jim Reeves, Mort O'Sullivan, Quint Studer, Lacey Collier, Collier Merrill, Ed Spears or the assortment of lawyers involved. It isn't even about the project's patriarchs: the late Vince Whibbs, mayor of Pensacola, the late Adm. Jack Fetterman.

Not now it isn't. It's about getting it done.

At bottom, the newspaper sobs, it doesn't matter if the park is good, or bad, or too commercial, or too non-commercial. Something has to be built or it will be evidence it's "the same Pensacola."

Odd, that. This is the very attitude -- 'It doesn't matter if it's terrible, just build it' -- that we always thought was "the same old Pensacola."
minor edit 4-13 am

Southerners Celebrating Slavery

You'll remember last week's 'apology' from Republican governor Bob McConnell for "forgetting" to mention slavery when he declared April "Confederate History Month" in Virginia. McConnell later issued an amendment to his own proclamation, adding a new paragraph to the already-released text.

Ed Gilgore has a superior idea he calls "Neoconfederate History Month":

[A]s a white southerner old enough to remember the final years of Jim Crow, when every month was Confederate History Month, I have a better idea for McDonnell: Let’s have a Neo-Confederate History Month that draws attention to the endless commemorations of the Lost Cause that have wrought nearly as much damage as the Confederacy itself.

It would be immensely useful for Virginians and southerners generally to spend some time reflecting on the century or so of grinding poverty and cultural isolation that fidelity to the Romance in Gray earned for the entire region, regardless of race. Few Americans from any region know much about the actual history of Reconstruction, capped by the shameful consignment of African Americans to the tender mercies of their former masters, or about the systematic disenfranchisement of black citizens (and in some places, particularly McDonnell’s Virginia, of poor whites) that immediately followed.

A Neo-Confederate History Month could be thoroughly bipartisan. Republicans could enjoy greater exposure to the racism of such progressive icons as William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson, not to mention Democratic New Deal crusaders in the South like Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo. The capture of the political machinery of Republican and Democratic parties in a number of states, inside and beyond the South, by the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, would be an interesting subject for further study as well.

Most of all, a Neo-Confederate History Month could remind us of the last great effusion of enthusiasm for Davis and Lee and Jackson and all the other avatars of the Confederacy: the white southern fight to maintain racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s. That’s when “Dixie” was played as often as the national anthem at most white high school football games in the South; when Confederate regalia were attached to state flags across the region; and when the vast constitutional and political edifice of pre-secession agitprop was brought back to life in the last-ditch effort to make the Second Reconstruction fail like the first.
* * *
Any Neo-Confederate History Month would be incomplete, of course, without reference to the contemporary conservative revival of states’ rights and nullification theories redolent of proto-Confederates, Confederates, and neo-Confederates.
* * *
A greater public understanding of the exceptionally unsavory tradition that conservative Republicans are following in claiming that states can refuse to accept health care reform would be valuable without an explicit discussion of current politics.

We've never understood veneration of those who fought for the Confederate states' supposed 'right' to expand slavery to the western states, which was the immediate driving force for secession from the Union after Abraham Lincoln's election. One frequently encounters that veneration here in Northwest Florida.

One friend, who otherwise seems fairly sensible, reveres an ancestor he never knew simply because he was a Confederate soldier. But the guy was a traitor to the United States!

It seems to us no different than if we were to celebrate finding one of Hitler's henchmen in our own family tree. Learn about him and what he did? Certainly. But honor him, revere him, dedicate statues to him, run around with bumper stickers on a pick-up truck proudly announcing our fealty to his cause?

Never. The mere thought is repulsive.

Dept. of Amplification

04-10 am

Prof. Jack Balkin agrees that remembering the Confederacy and what it stood for is worthwhile and timely, though perhaps not for the same reasons governor McConnell has in mind. See here and here.

Dept. of Further Amplification
04-11 am

Scott Lemieux is thinking along the same lines. If the right-wingers say it's okay to celebrate the Southern Confederacy's inauguration of the Civil War, why not on the same logic celebrate "Nazi History Month?"

Stephanopolous' Stupidity

Steve Benen translates ABC's George Stephanopolous' stupidity:

In effect, the ["Good Morning America"] host was saying, "Some conspicuously unintelligent right-wing media personality said something stupid about a subject she knows nothing about. Mr. President, how do you respond?"

Read Benen's description of the interview to see just how low television is taking public discourse.

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.
* * *
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

Republican Leadership: Stupid or Ignorant?

Via Steve Benen, we learn that reporter Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Constitution spent an hour and twenty minutes with Senator Saxby Chambliss and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The conclusion?

"Anyone who thinks Republican lawmakers are well-informed, thoughtful public officials, with a working knowledge of public policy, simply isn't paying attention."