Florida Legislature Passes Landmark Merit Pay Legislation

March 17, 2011

 

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

About 11 months ago, former Florida Governor Charlie Crist vetoed a major overhaul of teacher pay and tenure as a prelude to running for the Senate as an independent. Yesterday, the Florida Senate passed a revised version of the bill, which the new Florida Governor Rick Scott seems anxious to sign.

Stephen Sawchuck at  the Teacher Beat Blog summarized the bill:

Among other things, S. 736:

• Requires 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation to be based on state standardized tests or other national, local, or industry measures for those subjects not gauged at the state level;

• Requires evaluations to consider four levels of teacher performance;

• As of July 1 of this year, ends the awarding of “continuing” and “professional service” contract status (the Florida equivalent of tenure) and puts all new teachers on annual contracts;

• Permits districts to extend annual contracts only to teachers with good evaluations; those with two “unsatisfactory” ratings in a row, or two “needs improvement” ratings within a three-year period, could not be renewed;

• “Grandfathers” in teachers who now have tenure but allows them to be dismissed for the performance reasons stated above;

• Requires districts to establish performance-based salary schedules by July 1, 2014, for all new hires, and to phase existing teachers onto the new schedules as student-growth measures are developed; and

• Does away with layoffs based on reverse seniority.

Teachers are not interchangeable widgets, and should not be treated as such.  Highly effective teachers deserve greater recognition, and the students of highly ineffective teachers deserve better.  While merit pay is a complex subject, we can do better than simply paying teachers to age.

Florida once again has raised the bar on education reform for the rest of the nation.

6 Comments | teacher pay, teacher quality, teacher union | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

NYT on Tenure Reform

February 4, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Nothing quite signifies the intellectual bankruptcy of the unions better than this article. Faced with a significant national trend towards revoking tenure, the President of the NEA fires back with: an absurd story about an attempt to fire an Arizona teacher 30 years ago based upon a speech impediment that was actually an accent!

Mr. Van Roekel of the teachers’ union disagreed. Recounting a story that had the burnish of something told many times, he recalled that around 1980, when he was a union leader in Arizona, he had arranged to have a speech pathologist assess a teacher whom a principal was trying to fire because of a speech impediment. The pathologist determined that the teacher had a New York accent.

“She would say ‘ideer,’ instead of ‘idea,’ ” Mr. Van Roekel said. “The principal thought that was a speech impediment. Without a fair dismissal law, that principal could have fired her arbitrarily, without citing any reason.”

Riiiiiiiiight….

Could it be that I am the only one who has noticed that, despite all of the complaining that unions do about administrators, that the vast majority of them come straight out of the teaching ranks?  Furthermore, the state of school accountability in Arizona 30 years ago would have been zilch, either in the form of testing or parental choice. Such a dearth of transparency and competitive pressure would enable the arbitrary firings of staff of even effective staff. Oddly though, zilch in the way of accountability, whether in the form of testing with teeth or parental choice is the prefered policy stance of the NEA.

Strange that.

Further, the debate over tenure that I am watching involves complex discussions about methods for measuring teacher effectiveness rather than proposals for arbitrary and capricious firing. I wonder what debate Van Roekel has been watching.

15 Comments | teacher quality, teacher union | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner