Legislative Attacks Against Public School Teachers Will Not Improve Florida’s Teacher Shortage.

Please take a moment and think about a teacher you had who made a difference in your life. Do you remember how that teacher inspired you, supported you, engaged you? For me, Ms. Mathog, Mr. Murphy and Mrs. Splaingard immediately come to mind. My daughter has been particularly inspired by Ms. Poetz and Ms. Koche. The one thing I know for certain about these teachers is that they were not then, nor are they now, the problem with the public school system. These teachers, and the many others who inspire children every day, are the life blood of public schools. They are not the enemy.

So why do our legislators continue to propose bills that appear to be “anti-teacher”?

So far, there are several anti-teacher bills filed in the Florida Legislature for the 2017 session.

SB856 (Broxson) and HB373 (Grant): “You Will Have No Job Security”

These bills will prohibit local school boards from awarding contracts longer than 1 year to even their highest performing teachers. As we wrote earlier, all new teachers have been hired on annual contracts since the passage of SB736 in 2011. Currently, almost half of Florida’s 67 school districts are rewarding their most valuable teachers with extended year contracts, providing job security to the teachers the districts most want to retain. These bill will eliminate that practice and, by denying the longer term contracts often required to qualify for a mortgage, should be expected to worsen the teacher’s shortage.

SB1500 (Mayfield) and HB1223 (Fine): “You Will Retire When We Say You Can”

These bills prevent teachers from retiring mid year: “The State Board of Education is directed to adopt rules prohibiting instructional personnel and school administrators from selecting a retirement date that occurs during the regular school year, except for retirement due to disability or illness.” While, we suspect, these bills were meant to lessen the teaching shortage, imprisoning teachers eligible for retirement hardly seems the best solution to the current crisis. For the record, if my child’s teacher is so tired of teaching that they want to retire mid year, I’m not sure I would want them, against their will, teaching my children for the reminder of the year.

SB1292 (Baxly) and HB11 (Plakon): “We Will Destroy Your Union”

These are bills designed to destroy the teachers union by allowing loss of certification to any union where less than 51% of eligible members pay dues. All teachers are currently protected by the union even if they don’t pay dues, but if not enough teachers pay dues, the union can be shut down. The bill expressly exempts organizations representing law enforcement, correctional officers, or fire fighters. It appears the only union these law makers want to bust is the teachers’ union.

Why destroy the teachers union but leave the fire fighters, correctional officers and law enforcement unions untouched? Could it be that the teachers unions lean left and the others lean right? Or is it that the teachers union is a major road block in legislative efforts to privatize/reform public education?

As we have written before, Florida has a significant teacher shortage and we believe the shortage is due to a significant extent to failed reform policies, such as SB736, which have left the teaching profession so undesirable that few high school graduates are even considering it as a career. In a recent report from the Learning Policy Institute Florida was ranked 42nd out of the 50 states and Washington, D.C., on the institute’s “teaching attractiveness” rating, which took into account factors such as the percentage of teachers worried about job security because it was tied to student test scores and the percentage who felt they had “control in their classroom.” (Read more about the study here.) Both the House and the Senate felt the teachers shortage was important enough to warrant pre-session committee workshops where they discussed possible solutions with superintendents and educators at length. To our knowledge, during those committee meetings, no one suggested eliminating job security, forbidding retirement or eliminating collective bargaining.

The above bills will not address the issues that have lead to the current teaching shortage crisis and, more than likely, will do more harm than good. Legislators are making the situation WORSE when they tell teachers “You will have no job security and will only retire when we say you can and, by the way, we want to destroy your collective bargaining powers.” These bills will be seen as a direct attack on the teaching profession and a continuation of the apparent war on teachers. We suggest you oppose them.

Not all the bills proposed in 2017 are anti-teacher, of course. These are a few bills that might begin to reverse to policies that have lead to  the current teacher shortage. We suggest you support them:

Senator Rader filed SB 238, called the “Florida Teacher Fair Pay Act”, requiring the Legislature to fund the Florida Education Finance Program at a level that ensures a guaranteed minimum annual salary of $50,000 for instructional personnel beginning in 2017-18 and requiring that the minimum salary be adjusted for inflation annually.

Senators Montford, Lee, Mayfield, Garcia and Stewart filed SB 964, which, among much needed assessment reforms, would eliminate VAM (Value Added Model, a confusing, state mandated algorithm that ties teacher evaluations to student test scores) and return the responsibility of evaluating teachers back to the local school district. A companion bill (HB1249 ) was recently filed by Representative Beshears.

This list is not complete. We encourage you to follow education legislation and support your favorite teachers by supporting bills that advance rather than degrade their profession. You can create a Senate Tracker account, making tracking individual bills and committees easy, by registering here.

And, please, send a thank you to those teachers who continue to inspire and delight public school children daily, despite the continued attack on their profession.