Gov. Charlie Crist has been jawboned and buttonholed as he has traveled around the state in recent days, and his office was deluged with 120,000 messages. Passions have not run so high in Florida, the governor said, since the controversy over ending the life of Terri Schiavo in 2005.

This time, the point of contention was eliminating tenure for Florida public school teachers and tying their pay and job security to how well their students were learning.

On Thursday, Mr. Crist picked a side, vetoing a bill passed last week by the Florida Legislature that would have introduced the most sweeping teacher pay changes in the nation.

The veto puts Mr. Crist, a moderate Republican, at odds with his party base in the Republican-controlled Legislature. His decision has also renewed speculation that he might drop out of the Republican primary for a United States Senate seat and run in the general election as an independent. For months, he has been trailing the more conservative Republican candidate, Marco Rubio, a Tea Party favorite, in polls.

Mr. Crist said Thursday that his decision was not political. He cited “the incredible outpouring of opposition by teachers, parents, students, superintendents, school boards and legislators.”

The bill was supported by the Florida Department of Education and statewide business groups, which expressed disappointment in the governor’s decision, saying that teachers should be held more accountable.

But the governor, announcing his veto in the Capitol in Tallahassee, said the changes envisioned would put “teachers in jeopardy of losing their jobs and teaching certificates, without a clear understanding of how gains will be measured.”

Linking teacher pay to student achievement has long been a goal of some education reformers. They are mostly conservatives, but their ranks also include people in the Obama administration.

They argue that teachers should be treated like people in most professions, and paid based on how effective they are.

The issue has made for a season of strange bedfellows, with the Obama administration’s chief education initiative, Race to the Top, seemingly encouraging just the kind of overhaul that Florida Republicans endorsed and that teachers and their allies furiously opposed…

www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/us/16teachers.html

“Right now, 25 percent of our students fail to graduate high school, and as many as 60 percent of college freshmen need remedial education. Millions of jobs are unfilled for lack of qualified applicants.”

Joe Klein writes in Time (“Why We’re Failing Our Schools”) about how The New York legislature failed to lift a cap on charter schools in the state and therefore completely eliminated New York’s chances of winning the $700 million in potential Race to the Top funding. He looks at the history of the teachers’ union in New York:

“…The New York teachers’ union was launched in 1960 and led in the early years by the smartest and toughest union man I’ve ever met, Albert Shanker. The teachers are among the most powerful interest groups in New York State (and nationally, in the Democratic Party). The UFT’s slogan is ‘A Union of Professionals,’ but it is quite the opposite: an old-fashioned industrial union that has won for its members a set of work rules more appropriate to factory hands. There are strict seniority rules about pay, school assignment, length of the school day and year. In New York, it is near impossible to fire a teacher — even one accused of a crime, drug addiction or flagrant misbehavior. The miscreants are stashed in ‘rubber rooms’ at full pay, for years, while the union pleads their cases. In New York, school authorities are forbidden, by state law, to evaluate teachers by using student test results.

“Toward the end of his life, Shanker began to realize the union was headed down the wrong path. In a 1993 speech, he talked about the need for more accountability: ‘I wouldn’t be saying these things … if I didn’t have the sense that we are at the same point that the auto industry was at a few years ago. They could see they were losing market share every year and still not believe that it really had anything to do with the quality of the product … I think that we will get — and deserve — the end of public education through some sort of privatization scheme if we don’t behave differently.’

“…There are national implications to this fight. As Shanker pointed out, American schools have been slipping for decades — our students are now 32nd internationally in math scores, 10th in science, 12th in reading. It will be impossible to rebuild our economy — to create the sophisticated, high-paying jobs we need — as long as we have an archaic, industrial-age school system. It’s also hard to keep a strong democracy with a citizenry that is increasingly uneducated and ill informed. No, teachers’ unions are not the only problem here. Troglodytic local school boards and apathetic parents are just as bad. But the unions, and their minions in the Democratic Party, have been a reactionary force in education reform for too long. Barack Obama began to change that last year with Race to the Top. It’s a fight he needs to expand, and win.”

[By Joe Klein Thursday, Jan. 28, 2010
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1957277,00.html#ixzz0dwz8Nyf2]

More on Race to the Top…

As most states vied for the competitive federal Race to the Top funds, other states played politics and, in doing so, turned down a potential $700 million for K-12 education.

Texas, for example, adopted a Lone Star attitude toward Race to the Top. Governor Rick Perry (R) said, “We would be foolish and irresponsible to place our children’s future in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and special-interest groups thousands of miles away in Washington.”

Bill SBX5 1 would have given children attending the lowest-performing schools in the state the opportunity to transfer to good schools. It also would have provided a system for rewarding educators who consistently improved student scores. It was struck down and replaced by a watered-down, union-supported bill sponsored by Julia Brownley (D-Santa Monica), the education committee’s chairwoman.

The new bill, ABX5 8, eliminates the school choice option and increases regulations of charter schools. It does, however, get rid of the cap on charter schools, as SBX51 would also have done. That’s one of the few similarities between the bills. Governor Schwarzenegger states that if the Brownley bill reaches his desk he will veto it. There is fear and frustration that by striking down SBX51, California will not be competitive enough in its reforms to qualify for Race to the Top funds.

Here’s a typical statement from the California Teachers Association (CTA), a union: “Education reform shouldn’t be a race; it deserves serious attention that will actually help kids and improve student achievement. Proposed reforms need thoughtful discussion with all stakeholders, including parents, teachers and community members. They should not be sprung on the public just hours before last-minute hearings if any meaningful input is really going to take place.” -CTA President David Sanchez

Is the slow, ongoing path to failure preferable to a competitive race to success?

One article I read reported that CTA developed a strategy this summer to fight Race to the Top legislation and set aside up to $950,000 for it. Making sure the Romero bill wouldn’t pass was part of that strategy.

Brian Nestande (R-Sacramento) stated in a press release: “President Obama offered us the chance to promote excellence and secure needed funding for our schools, but instead Assembly Democrats chose to embrace the status-quo.”

Transitioning from West Coast unions to East Coast unions, the title of a Boston Globe article pretty much speaks for itself: “Teachers’ test-linked bonuses overruled: Arbitrator decides high-scores reward violates contract”.

Boston public schools intended to pay math teachers at the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science and two other schools participating in the program bonuses for high scores on Advanced Placement exams. Math teachers would have received $100 for each high score achieved by their students. It was part of an Exxon Mobil-funded grant program. The program was seen as an incentive for teachers to teach Advanced Placement classes, which require much work and preparation.

The Boston Globe reports that the program was dismantled when “the arbitrator ruled that Boston officials failed to negotiate the bonuses and other aspects of the program with the union before entering into an agreement on Feb. 28, 2008…”

The Globe further states: “While the unions support the idea of more AP courses, the groups oppose bonuses for individual teachers, arguing they go against the spirit of teamwork among faculty.”

AP participation had soared in the schools participating in the program.

Ahh, the future of education…it’s looking like the slogan will be: sign on the union line.

Bloomberg is looking to the New York legislature to require all the state’s districts to implement “data-driven systems” by which to evaluate teachers and administrators. This seems like common sense, but sometimes there’s no place for common sense in politics–just money, lobbying, agendas, and jobs.

Bloomberg would like New York teacher layoffs to be tied to performance, not seniority (as is the current status quo). In other words, the lowest-performing teachers would be cut regardless of how long or short a time they’d been in the system. The way it works now is the teachers newest to the system get the ax first. They could be outstanding movers and shakers while their unmotivated, just-in-it-for-the-paycheck peers get to keep their jobs just because they’ve been there longer.

I really have a hard time stomaching the idea of first in, first out. It should be: in with the good, out with the bad. I believe k-12 public education needs to adopt more of a private sector approach to hiring and firing. Imagine a corporation that couldn’t fire unproductive employees; those employees knew they had locked-in job security and therefore didn’t have to work hard. Conversely, new employees knew no matter how hard they worked and how well they performed, if someone needed to be cut it would be them. Where would the motivation be? Would that corporation thrive? This is the model used by the k-12 public education system in America. I’ll leave it to you to judge the product.

The amount of money wasted on lousy teachers with too much job protection is astonishing. New York City pays over $100 million dollars on teachers who are not currently employed. Many of those teachers lost their jobs when their schools were shut down for low academic performance. Teachers who lost their NYC jobs and were not able to find other ones in the system got to keep their salaries even though they weren’t working! Bloomberg wants the new teacher contracts to stipulate a one-year limit on reserve pool teachers.

The humorous illustration below by Marcellus Hall, letters to the editor, and the original New York Times piece can be found at: www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/education/26teachers.html

It appears there is a glimmer of hope for the school reform movement in California.

The California Senate approved Senate Bill X5 1 last week, which repeals the state’s cap on charter schools and provides students at low-performing schools with the choice to attend better schools. It also “encourages school districts to reward teachers who consistently improve student scores.” That quote from the Sacramento Bee (http://www.sacbee.com/education/story/2306978.html) is a bit vague. I’m not sure what form the “encouragement” would come in. I haven’t had a chance to look into the details of Senate Bill X5 1, but I am excited by the bill’s overarching goals and aims.

The impetus for Senate Bill X5 1 is California’s desire to receive part of the competitive Race to the Top education funds, which amount to $4.35 billion total. The bill still has to clear California’s Assembly, and guess who’s fighting it? Shocking surprise: the union. Sandra Jackson of the California Teachers Association said, “We feel right now it’s unnecessary and being rushed through.” Like I said before, I don’t know all the details on this bill, but Jackson’s statement sounds like typical union rhetoric. California cannot afford to keep its youth undereducated year after year so that locked-in educators–no matter how good or bad they are–can keep receiving salaries. The upholding of the status quo is ruining the chances of millions of children. We are dumbing them down in the name of politics and paychecks, and it is a disgraceful and disheartening practice that needs to stop. It’s time for real, unfettered reform in California and the nation.