Senators Are Still At It
Backstabbing, that is.
These are Florida state senators, and they have an idea: Senate bill would tie teachers’ pay to students’ performance
Florida Senate Bill 6 is not popular among local teachers, to say the least.
The education reform bill would eliminate existing teacher contracts and replace them with contracts that base more than 50 percent of a teacher’s wages on student achievement.
Only the contracts for Wall Street bankers are safe from government meddling. Contracts negotiated by workers are ignored at will. Let’s see, there couldn’t possibly be a problem tying half of a teacher’s pay to student achievement. I mean, students certainly wouldn’t use that to manipulate teachers, and teachers wouldn’t feel pressure to get creative with the FCAT… No reason to worry at all about all of the A average students coming out of Florida schools unable to read.
This should really help to find teachers to work in the poorer schools in the state. 😈
6 comments
Uhm, Brian… that’s the point. Why should the teachers of those little brown children get paid the same as the teachers of fine upstanding white children? Why I declare, the next thing you’re going to say is that the Negro, Cuban, and Mexican should get the right to vote! 😈
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
.-= last blog ..Knee-capping the young =-.
“… eliminate existing teacher contracts and replace them with contracts…”
That says it all. Don’t like the contract your employees negotiated with you in good faith last year? Just unilaterally abrogate it. If you are asked how you can do that, say, “We lied. So sue us.” You know the courts won’t help teachers against you.
If this actually goes forward, I see only one viable solution: STRIKE! Shut down the whole fucking district. Let them deal with all the angry parents who have to cope with their kids at home. Fill up the jails if necessary. The unilateral rescinding of a contract is a really big deal, deserving a response so strong the legislature and school board will never forget.
Steve: a) Teacher strikes are illegal in Florida, b) so they can’t fire all the teachers, you say? Why, sure they can! Just fire’em all, and hire the preachers and sunday school teachers of the local churches on temp tickets to teach all the classes. What, you say the preachers and sunday school teachers aren’t qualified to teach Algebra and Physics classes? Heresy! Burn, demon, burn!
So from the point of view of the Christian Taliban who run Florida, a teacher strike would be a win-win for them. They could get rid of all those pesky certified teachers who, like, teach those fact thingies rather than that Jesus rode dinosaurs, and they would reduce school spending drastically because hiring dregs off the street on temp tickets costs a lot less than experienced certified teachers. What could go wrong? Other than a generation of kids even worse-educated than today’s generation, which, in their view, is a feature, not a flaw?
– Badtux the Education Penguin
.-= last blog ..Knee-capping the young =-.
It doesn’t occur to these clowns that by piling on the requirements to be a teacher in this state, they have given the teachers options that weren’t available to them in the “good old days”, like qualifications for other jobs.
The teachers won’t bother to strike, they’ll quit, and while the temps may fulfill the state’s requirements, the state will lose Federal funding. NCLB is a major factor in pushing teachers to “update their skills”.
They can’t just turn it over to the fundies, because the fundies had a Blaine amendment put in the state constitution to make sure those nasty Catholics didn’t get any state money, so the fundies can’t get it either.
This is more re-election sound-bite legislation, as well as the Republicans eternal for “magic bullets” that will solve problems without doing any real work. Republicans are the laziest animals on the planet.
And what about teachers who have kids who are homeless (thus bringing an amount of stress that affects learning ability) or going hungry (that affects their brain functions) or those with excess amounts of toxins as their “body burden” (which affects learning ability, emotional levels, etc.)
Kids aren’t products that come off the factory line. Many things affect the ability for learning, not just the ability of the teacher.
.-= last blog ..Happy Pi Day =-.
Jill, reality and politics never intersect in Florida. We have had to put initiatives on the ballot to get the few improvements that we have achieved in the system. The people who can afford to run for the legislature, which is a part-time, two month/year job, guarantees that most of the legislation produced is created by special interest groups.