Scrapping the Worst and Dumbest…

Yesterday, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced he would like to do away with Florida’s “Best and Brightest” teacher bonus program and instead replace it with his own plan to raise teacher pay and increase retention. DeSantis said his plan should be formally announced within the next month and he blamed the Legislature for creating a plan that was “too complicated.”

“How the Legislature did it last time, I still don’t understand how that’s going to work,” he said, speaking with reporters after a Cabinet meeting. “I don’t want it to be too complicated.”

In our opinion, we don’t think governors should sign bills for $285 million programs that they believe are “too complicated” and unlikely to work; that is what their veto pen is for.

Also, DeSantis, who called for the overhaul he now claims is “too complicated,” should take responsibility for the overhaul’s shortcomings. It is a bad look to give the legislature specific instructions regarding how to overhaul a program and then blame them for its failures when they follow your directions.

Florida is in the midst of a critical teacher shortage, in part because lawmakers have focused on bonuses and gimmicks rather than simply funding public schools. Despite Florida’s $1 TRILLION dollar Economy (the 4th biggest economy in the U.S. and 17th largest in the world), Florida ranks 45th in public education funding and 48th in teacher pay (20 years ago, we were 27th and 29th, respectively).

Since its inception, the Best and Brightest program has been repeatedly criticized by teachers and education experts and ridiculed in the national media as a nonsensical way to attract and reward excellent teachers. Teacher need raises, not bonuses.

Rather than take a serious look at the education funding needed to increase teacher salaries in 2019, DeSantis chose to revamp the Best and Brightest teacher program, a program that was once called the “worst bill of the year.” The Florida Legislature merely followed his advice.

On February 7, 2019, DeSantis held a press event outlining HIS plans for overhauling the Best and Brightest teacher bonus scheme. His new proposal would do away with the section that rewards teachers partly based on their scores on the ACT or SAT college admissions exams they took while in high school, which he claimed “didn’t make sense.”

“His plan, he said, would give nearly 45,000 teachers who had earned “highly effective” ratings bonuses of $9,000 or more. On Twitter, he wrote that teachers would earn more than $9,000 if they work in a school that gained at least 1 percent more in points in its school grading calculation, used to issue A-to-F grades to public schools.”

On they same day, he announced his plans on Twitter:

On 2/15/2019, when Governor DeSantis released his “Budget Recommendation – Implementing Bill” , his ideas for an overhaul of the Best and Brightest Bonus scheme were described in detail, including limiting the bonus to teachers whose schools earn at least 1 percent more in points in its school grading calculation. (The 2019 Budget Recomendation-Implementing Bills are no longer linked to the Governor’s 2019-2020 budget.)

SB7070, filed 3/1/2019, outlined their version of DeSantis’ plan: eliminating the ACT/SAT exam requirement and adding the connection to the school grade calculation (limiting the award to teachers in schools “which ha(ve) improved an average of 3 percentage points or more in the percentage of total possible points achieved for determining school grades over the prior 3 years.” A 3% increase over 3 years is very similar to a 1% increase in the school grade calculation.

At the time he announced his plans, we warned the Governor of our concerns regarding his new scheme in an open letter. We reminded his “teachers need raises and job security, not bandaids on a failed program.” These were a couple of our concerns regarding his new plan:

• Free market economics will tell you that best way to recruit and retain good teachers during a critical teacher shortage is to pay them more. Bonuses are not raises. They only temporarily improve a teacher’s pay. Teacher’s need raises if they are to qualify for mortgages, afford to rent in high cost areas, or have a secure retirement.
• By limiting the bonus to teachers whose schools earn at least 1 percent more in points in its school grading calculation, you will increase the high stakes attached to testing and increase a school’s incentive to “teach to the test.” School Grades, as you must know, are almost entirely calculated on student achievement on state Math and Reading assessments. When schools focus on math and reading scores, they become the “big standardized testing machine” that just last week you said you wanted to avoid.

If Governor DeSantis is able to completely scrap the Best and Brightest program and repurpose the funding for significant teacher salary increases, that would be progress. It will have only taken the legislature 4 years (and over a half a billion dollars) to get rid of “the Worst and Dumbest Idea Ever.”

We fear, however, another shell game – shifting of funds between accounts without any significant increase in overall education funding. Should we be concerned that DeSantis continues to refer to increases in teacher “pay” not teacher “salaries?” For now, we will await the Governor’s proposals. Hopefully they will allow salary increases and not new bonus schemes; because if we had a dollar for every time a teacher advocated for “raises, not bonuses” we could fund the salary increases ourselves.