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Crist wavering on merit-pay bill? Gov. says teacher views “weighing heavily” on him
Ohanian Comment:The activism is good news but the whole thing is too awful to post in the Joyful spot.
My joy at this current activism is somewhat diluted by the fact that we never seem to get this kind of outcry against the scripted curriculum and high stakes testing that ruin kids' lives.
Florida teachers got 15,000 signatures in a rush campaign to derail Senate Bill 6. The Educator Roundtable Petition to End NCLB was up for over a year and we managed to get only 35,000 signatures. Stop National Standards isn't quite burning up the Internet with backers.
And so the public perceives teachers as only caring about their own salaries. I know this is not true, but it's way past time for teachers to break their silence on these critical issues that affect children directly.
Leslie Postal blog
Our South Florida colleague just posted this on our sister’s paper’s political blog, and I thought it would interest our readers. A lot.
Gov. Charlie Crist, who has said he planned to sign the merit pay bills, admitted today that the concerns (and outrage) expressed by many teachers were "weighing heavily" on him. As of last week, his office had received more than 2,000 letters and email mails and more than 1,200 telephone calls about the bills, most from people opposed to lawmakers’ plans.
Here’s colleague Josh Hafenbrack's post on what the Governor said today.
Gov. Charlie Crist is considering a veto of the controversial merit-pay plan up for a vote today in the Florida House. He cites concerns from teachers.
But in his 2006 campaign for governor, candidate Crist laid out a plan titled "Success for every student" that endorsed the idea of merit pay for teachers. He called it "increased funding and incentives for the best and brightest."
The Crist Administration will seek to appropriate money every year to increase funding for teacher compensation to 10 percent to 25 percent of teachers in the state,” Crist’s policy platform says. "The determination to increase compensation will focus on measured performance, will be a collaboration between state and local officials, and will be implemented by school principals."
Candidate Crist also pledged to "develop the tools necessary" to measure teacher performance in fields not subject to the FCAT or standardized tests.
The merit-pay plan in the Legislature would rate teachers primarily on student learning gains. Teachers would be eligible for pay raises only if their students show progress on standardized tests. It would also eliminate tenure job projections for teachers hired after July.
Here's an addition at 1:33 p.m. April 8, 2010:
Borrowing a page from the Democratic Congress’s health care playbook, Sen. John Thrasher, R-St. Augustine, floated a new option in case Gov. Charlie Crist is thinking about vetoing his teacher merit-pay bill: a separate, reconciliation bill to make some changes after it’s signed into law.
“If the bill passes today, there’s always an option for what somebody could call a glitch bill, somebody could call a reconciliation bill -- that’s getting to be a popular term,” Thrasher said. A second, fix-it bill in theory could be used to tone done some of the bill’s more contentious provisions, such as the ironclad link between student test scores and teacher pay. But, Thrasher said, any reconciliation bill would deal with “implementation, not overall policy.”
Crist, who had supported the merit-pay bill, has backed off this week and indicated he’s considering a veto. Teachers are flooding legislators with complaints about tying future pay raises to student scores on tests such as the FCAT.
On a potential Crist veto, Thrasher told reporters: “He’s told me he’s going to sign it, and I take him at his word. He told me several times he’s going to sign it.”
Later Thrasher added, “He told me personally he liked the legislation. But, you know, people can change their mind I guess.”
— Leslie Postal blog
Orlando Sentinel blog
2010-04-07
http://tinyurl.com/ycn93ta
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