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Florida teachers' pay faces big overhaul

BY SHANNON COLAVECCHIO AND HANNAH SAMPSON

Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau

When Pasco County school principal Ginny Yanson had to get rid of a bad teacher recently, it was like running an obstacle course.

The teacher was new, still on probation. Under state law, she could be fired without cause. And yet, when she refused to execute lesson plans and "wasn't doing any teaching," Yanson couldn't just pull out a pink slip.

Yanson had weekly meetings with the teacher. She brought in mentors, model teachers, sample lesson plans. Yanson gave her a letter with a timeline to improve.

"She did not follow through with any of those things," said Yanson, 63, principal at Sand Pine Elementary in Wesley Chapel.

It took the threat of firing by the School Board to finally get the teacher out of the classroom, Yanson said.

That's the kind of story that fuels Republican lawmakers in Tallahassee as they promote legislation to revamp how teachers are evaluated, paid and fired -- in what could be Florida's biggest education overhaul in a decade.

The plan would eliminate "professional services" contracts -- what some people informally call tenure -- and tie half of teachers' pay to student performance on the FCAT and end-of-course exams.

Florida would be the first in the nation to hinge so much of an educator's salary on student performance, and one of just a handful of states that do not award multiple-year contracts to teachers with classroom experience.

UNCERTAIN PROSPECT

The prospect has many teachers concerned.

Miami-Dade teacher Ingrid Robledo, a 20-year veteran, said the bill would lead to all kinds of uncertainty for educators.

"I don't have the job security, I won't have the peace of mind of having a steady salary," she said. "How am I going to be able to afford a house, how am I going to be able to provide for my family?"

Robledo, who has a master's degree and National Board Certification, teaches AP Spanish to eighth-graders at A-rated George Washington Carver Middle School in Coral Gables. She worries teachers would be penalized with lower pay for going to schools that have poor test scores.

"What is going to happen to those students?" she asked.

Senate sponsor John Thrasher acknowledged his proposal (SB6) would bring the most significant changes since former Gov. Jeb Bush established his A-Plus plan a decade ago, cementing the FCAT as the measuring stick for student learning in elementary through high school.

"It's a Nixon-goes-to-China type of thing," said Thrasher, R-St. Augustine, a longtime Bush supporter who now leads the Florida Republican Party. "It's a major move and there's nothing wrong with that."

A similar bill stalled in the Senate last year but now looks more likely to pass because it has the political mojo of Thrasher and Senate President Jeff Atwater, who has deemed it a priority. Gov. Charlie Crist also supports the bill, which passed its first Senate committee as expected Wednesday on a party line vote.

"I think that, you know, it's really all about how the students perform at the end of the day anyway," said Crist, former state education commissioner. "So if we base how we compensate our teachers on how their students perform, it seems like a very natural thing."

If the measure becomes law, supporters and critics agree it will dramatically change teaching in Florida. The debate is whether that change will be for better or for worse.

Under the bill (SB6):

• Instead of the multiple-year "professional services" contracts now awarded to teachers after three years, they would serve a five-year probationary period followed by single-year contracts in which their pay is based on their evaluations. Half their pay would hinge on student learning gains measured in large part by test results, including end-of-course exams that districts would need to develop. That's a major change from the current system that uses degrees and years of service to set pay rates.

• The bonuses now afforded to teachers with National Board certification would be eliminated in 2014, but school districts could provide incentives for teachers who work in low-income areas and low-performing schools.

• The state would penalize districts that don't comply by cutting a percentage of their state funding and requiring them to raise the lost money through a higher tax on local taxpayers.

The contract provisions would affect any teacher hired after July 2010, and the changes for testing requirements and certification standards would be phased in for all teachers through the 2013-14 school year.

QUALITY CONTROL

While not all states call it "tenure," most have provisions in which teachers move from a "probationary" period early in their teaching careers to a multi-year or "continuing" contract after completing a certain period of teaching. A handful of states including Ohio and Indiana require probationary periods of five to seven years, but 32 states including Florida offer multiple-year contracts after three years; 10 states offer the longer contracts in one or two years.

Proponents say the current system makes it too easy for bad teachers to stay in classrooms. They believe the proposed overhaul would enhance the quality of Florida's teaching pool by paying more to teachers whose students show greater gains and to teachers who take on challenging assignments in low-income, high-need areas.

"Research shows us that the quality of the teacher is the most important tool in student learning," said Patricia Levesque, executive director of Bush's Foundation for Florida's Future. "This bill will ensure . . . that we pay teachers in high-need low income schools, and that we pay teachers whose students perform better."

Even President Barack Obama, a Democrat, has emphasized the need for such a change in speeches highlighting his administration's Race to the Top grant program for public schools. He says schools should reward the best teachers and stop leaving ineffective ones in the classroom. Florida is one of 16 finalists for the grant, and the state's application includes many of the same proposals for teacher pay and end-of-course exams that Thrasher proposes in SB6.

SLAP IN THE FACE

But Florida Education Association president Andy Ford said the bill is a slap in the face to teachers who have, since Bush established his A+ Plan, helped raise student performance and boosted Florida schools' national rankings.

"SB6 punishes the teachers who delivered these stunning results," Ford said.

Broward Teachers Union president Pat Santeramo said the bill, with heavy reliance on testing, comes at a time when educators have tried to take emphasis off the FCAT.

"It puts even greater stress on students and we're missing the whole point of what an education is about," he said.

"This is really harmful for the children of Florida," said Karen Aronowitz, president of United Teachers of Dade.

She said students benefit from having experienced teachers -- but the proposed law would not reward experience.

"If this bill becomes law, then you've really crashed a system for the teachers," Aronowitz said.

Ford told lawmakers the statutes already have provisions for getting rid of both new and long-serving teachers. But as Yanson's experience showed, that can be complicated and slow-going in real life.

"I'm not so sure professional services contracts are needed," Yanson said. "I know it gives people a sense of security. But really good teachers do their job well no matter what."

The Senate bill is expected to go to the full chamber early this session, but the House is still drafting its version and is moving cautiously. Rep. John Legg, R-Port Richey, said he expects his bill to "conceptually" be "on the same page" as Thrasher's, with ideas like differential pay. But the House isn't in lockstep with the Senate, Legg said. Thrasher stressed he is open to discussions on how to improve the bill.

That's welcome news to Wayne Blanton, head of the Florida School Boards Association.

"To say this bill needs work is a monumental understatement," Blanton told Thrasher.

"This bill right now does more to damage teacher morale than anything I have seen in a long time."

Times staff writers Steve Bousquet, Jeffrey Solochek and Stephanie Hayes contributed to this report.

From the Los Angeles Times...

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Opinion
The Big Idea -- it's bad education policy

One simple solution for our schools? A captivating promise, but a false one.

By Diane Ravitch

There have been two features that regularly mark the history of U.S. public schools. Over the last century, our education system has been regularly captivated by a Big Idea -- a savant or an organization that promised a simple solution to the problems of our schools. The second is that there are no simple solutions, no miracle cures to those problems.

Education is a slow, arduous process that requires the work of willing students, dedicated teachers and supportive families, as well as a coherent curriculum.

As an education historian, I have often warned against the seductive lure of grand ideas to reform education. Our national infatuation with education fads and reforms distracts us from the steady work that must be done.

Our era is no different. We now face a wave of education reforms based on the belief that school choice, test-driven accountability and the resulting competition will dramatically improve student achievement.

Once again, I find myself sounding the alarm that the latest vision of education reform is deeply flawed. But this time my warning carries a personal rebuke. For much of the last two decades, I was among those who jumped aboard the choice and accountability bandwagon. Choice and accountability, I believed, would offer a chance for poor children to escape failing schools. Testing and accountability, I thought, would cast sunshine on low-performing schools and lead to improvement. It all seemed to make sense, even if there was little empirical evidence, just promise and hope.

Today there is empirical evidence, and it shows clearly that choice, competition and accountability as education reform levers are not working. But with confidence bordering on recklessness, the Obama administration is plunging ahead, pushing an aggressive program of school reform -- codified in its signature Race to the Top program -- that relies on the power of incentives and competition. This approach may well make schools worse, not better.

Those who do not follow education closely may be tempted to think that, at long last, we're finally turning the corner. What could be wrong with promoting charter schools to compete with public schools? Why shouldn't we demand accountability from educators and use test scores to reward our best teachers and identify those who should find another job?

Like the grand plans of previous eras, they sound sensible but will leave education no better off. Charter schools are no panacea. The nation now has about 5,000 of them, and they vary in quality. Some are excellent, some terrible; most are in between. Most studies have found that charters, on average, are no better than public schools.

On the federal tests, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, from 2003 to 2009, charters have never outperformed public schools. Nor have black and Latino students in charter schools performed better than their counterparts in public schools.

This is surprising, because charter schools have many advantages over public schools. Most charters choose their students by lottery. Those who sign up to win seats tend to be the most motivated students and families in the poorest communities. Charters are also free to "counsel out" students who are unable or unwilling to meet expectations. A study of KIPP charters in the San Francisco area found that 60% of those students who started the fifth grade were gone before the end of eighth grade. Most of those who left were low performers.

Studies of charters in Boston, New York City and Washington have found that charters, as compared to public schools, have smaller percentages of the students who are generally hardest to educate -- those with disabilities and English-language learners. Because the public schools must educate everyone, they end up with disproportionate numbers of the students the charters don't want.

So we're left with the knowledge that a dramatic expansion in the number of privately managed schools is not likely to raise student achievement. Meanwhile, public schools will become schools of last resort for the unmotivated, the hardest to teach and those who didn't win a seat in a charter school. If our goal is to destroy public education in America, this is precisely the right path.

Nor is there evidence that student achievement will improve if teachers are evaluated by their students' test scores. Some economists say that when students have four or five "great" teachers in a row, the achievement gap between racial groups disappears. The difficulty with this theory is that we do not have adequate measures of teacher excellence.

Of course, it would be wonderful if all teachers were excellent, but many factors affect student scores other than their teacher, including students' motivation, the schools' curriculum, family support, poverty and distractions on testing day, such as the weather or even a dog barking in the school's parking lot.

The Obama education reform plan is an aggressive version of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind, under which many schools have narrowed their curriculum to the tested subjects of reading and math. This poor substitute for a well-rounded education, which includes subjects such as the arts, history, geography, civics, science and foreign language, hits low-income children the hardest, since they are the most likely to attend the kind of "failing school" that drills kids relentlessly on the basics. Emphasis on test scores already compels teachers to focus on test preparation. Holding teachers personally and exclusively accountable for test scores -- a key feature of Race to the Top -- will make this situation even worse. Test scores will determine salary, tenure, bonuses and sanctions, as teachers and schools compete with each other, survival-of-the-fittest style.

Frustrated by a chronic lack of progress, business leaders and politicians expect that a stern dose of this sort of competition and incentives will improve education, but they are wrong. No other nation is taking such harsh lessons from the corporate sector and applying them to their schools. No nation with successful schools ignores everything but basic skills and testing. Schools work best when teachers collaborate to help their students and strive together for common goals, not when they compete for higher scores and bonuses.

Having embraced the Republican agenda of choice, competition and accountability, the Obama administration is promoting the privatization of large segments of American education and undermining the profession of teaching. This toxic combination is the latest Big Idea in education reform. Like so many of its predecessors, it is not likely to improve education.