Rep. Eisnaugle’s vendetta against school boards

HB 1155 by Rep. Eisnaugle is a hostile payback directed at the Florida School Boards Association (FSBA) for joining others to sue the state over the legality of using diverted public funds for private school vouchers.  The bill unfairly bans the organization from accessing dues and other monies to fund litigation to defend the constitutional authority of its duly elected members. According to committee appearance cards, the only folks in favor of this bill are the Koch Brothers/Americans for Prosperity, Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Florida’s Future and the Betsy DeVos/John Kirtley pro-voucher super PAC, the Florida Federation for Children.

The bill passed in the House and its companion SB 1426 is on second reading in the Senate. This is another example of how Tallahassee disrespects our locally elected officials. Governor Scott and the Florida Legislature has made a national show of refusing to follow Federal dictates. These same politicians claim to respect voters right to “local control” while running bills every year meant to erode the power of elected positions closest to the people.

As the Tampa Bay Times reported:

Rep. Joseph Geller, D-Aventura — a former mayor of North Bay Village — called it “unduly restrictive” to local elected officials. “It seems to me that if somebody who’s been elected by the public to serve at the school board level … thinks that their duty is to disagree or contest something and they think that’s in the best interest of the parents and the children of their district, we shouldn’t be telling them, ‘No, they can’t,’ ” Geller said.

The general talking points repeated by legislators and proponents such as Jeff Bergosh whose six-member Florida Coalition of School Board Members was created last year as opposition to the FSBA are:

• Once the Florida Legislature passes a law, that’s final
• The membership of the FSBA whose dues come from school boards funded by public tax dollars must not be allowed as a group to use assets to question laws
• This bill guarantees that when it comes to school boards, courts won’t decide public policy. Only the legislature is empowered to do that.

The problem is that the Florida Legislature, Koch Brothers and Jeb’s free-market “education reform” foundations have re-defined “local” to mean Tallahassee. This is power grab 101. Stripping constitutional officers of the means to sue the state muzzles the voice of every Florida citizen. That’s not democracy.

 

 

 

A version of this post appeared in the Orlando Sentinel’s Central Florida 100

 

Becki Couch, school board member & former teacher on the powerful bond between teachers & students

Becki Couch is a former teacher and current Duval County, Florida school board member. She shares how a chance encounter with a former student reminds us that immeasurable human traits such as empathy and honoring the intrinsic value of every child strikes at the heart of what it means to teach.  No metric can capture the moment a teacher makes the connection that turns a student’s life around.  Often the returns of that moment aren’t known for years. There’s no bonus or extra evaluation points, just hard-won memories carried by hundreds of thousands of teachers of the students they’ll never forget. How lucky for Becki Couch to receive the gift of knowing that the child she she believed in so long ago learned to believe in himself. In her own words:

This evening I ran into one of my former students who I have often thought about over the years. He had a very rough home life and started abusing drugs at an early age. When I taught him in sixth grade he was a very difficult student and when I had him again in tenth grade he told me he didn’t want my class because he knew I wouldn’t like him due to our past.

I reminded him I am there to teach him and not hold a grudge and that I believed he was capable of changing if he let me help him. When he graduated he came by my class and told all of my students to treat me right because I never gave up on him even when he doubted himself.

Tonight he told me he has a good job (the same one he wrote about in his “Where I see myself in ten years” essay) and he does not take drugs. I was so happy to hear that. He was one of those kids that was standing at a fork in the road and he could turn his life around or continue down the destructive path he had been given by years of pain with his family.

He chose life! He chose to better himself and tonight I have once again been reminded of how important it is to have people in our lives that don’t give up on us.

Becki Couch was elected to represent District 6 on the Duval  County School Board in August 2010 and is currently serving her second term. She taught at Baldwin Middle Senior High School in Jacksonville, Florida for ten years. She and her husband, James, have two children who attend Duval County Public Schools.

Florida’s moral imperative – Return to elected Commissioner of Ed

Florida politicians have the power to right a serious wrong and give voters the chance to return to an elected Commissioner of Education and restore this important position to its rightful place in the governor’s cabinet, which would revert to its previous role as the Board of Education.

HJR 767 by Rep. Debbie Mayfield and SJR 942 by Sen. Rene Garcia would place the question on the 2016 ballot, requiring 60% of the vote to pass. These brave legislators understand that parents, teachers and children, the very people paying the price for “reform,” are shut out of public education policy decisions.  Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike resent the closed circle of a governor-appointed board of education and an appointed commissioner mixed with the undue influence of the Foundation for Florida’s Future, chamber types and the charter industry.

This week SJR 942 passed unanimously in the Florida Senate Ethics and Elections Committee. Bill sponsor, Sen. Garcia, said in the Tampa Bay Times, “If the education commissioner is the highest ranking education official in Florida, it’s important to have that member … to have a seat in the Cabinet.” The bill is scheduled next for Senate PreK-12 Education and will have its final committee stop in Senate Rules, giving it a chance to actually move.

The problem lies in the Florida House whose leadership sticks stubbornly to the education “reform” agenda. As a result, Rep. Mayfield’s HJR 767 is saddled with a crippling four committee stops. It’s been added and removed from Rep. Adkins education committee more than once. The roadblocks thrown by House leadership mean the return to an elected Commissioner of Education poses a frightening threat to the comfort of their absolute power.

As Rep. Mayfield told the Times: “We tend to forget that child doesn’t belong to the government. That child doesn’t belong to the Florida Chamber of Commerce. Parents should have a say in who is selected.”

Politicians lost the plot a long time ago. Back in 2000, former Governor Jeb Bush used the Constitutional Revision Commission to engineer the change from elected to appointed education commissioner. It passed as a ballot initiative in 2002. Florida was left with a significantly homogenized cabinet which combined the positions of comptroller and treasurer to create the Chief State Fiscal Officer, removed the Secretary of State and Commissioner of Education and converted them to appointed positions.  The goal was to have a small cabinet that would be under one party/gubernatorial control.  The elected cabinet now is: CFO, Attorney General and Commissioner of Agriculture.

In the case of public education, if there’s no dissenting voice of authority anywhere, the people’s will becomes irrelevant. It’s much easier to micro manage teachers, erode school board power, use high stakes testing to hurt children and ultimately sell the whole lot off to the highest bidder.  All without our permission.

Rep. Mayfield and Sen. Garcia, both Republicans, have taken a crucial first step. It’s going to take repeated attempts and big conversations to change the closed circle of the Governor, Board of Education, Commissioner of Education and their band of profit-driven policy influencers.  It’s going to take unflinching public oversight to elect folks who understand that the oath of office is a moral contract.

The simplicity of HJR 767/SJR 942 is that it restores what existed when there was much more commitment to serving real people instead of corporations and ROI philanthropists.  It may not be perfect, but it beats what we have right now.

Take action today. Click on this link to let legislators know how you feel.

 

 

The blowhard “common sense” behind Best & Brightest

Take it to the bank. Rep. Erik Fresen is determined to make his flawed $10K teacher “bonus” permanent with HB 7043. The $44 million dollar Best & Brightest passed last session in the most cowardly way – stuffed last minute into the massive budget bill – avoiding a full public hearing.

Fresen’s Best & Brightest endured a rocky first year that underscored the known bias that favors new teachers over veterans.  Many teachers found that their 80% or higher percentile rankings were hard to locate while other “highly effective” teachers never took the SAT. Which strikes at the ridiculous core of this bill – the unscientific premise that a test taken by a seventeen-year-old predicts adult performance for years to come.

And what does Rep. Erik Fresen use to justify spending at least $44 M in perpetuity? His opinion.

From the Tampa Bay Times:

The concept is Fresen’s brainchild. He calls it both recruitment and a retention tool, telling a Senate panel earlier this month that “common sense would tell you that a smarter person may do a better job teaching.”

Where’s the “common sense” in Rep. Fresen rushing, with zero empirical evidence, to codify into law an annual $44M “bonus” program that rewards teenage SAT scores in a state that pays its teachers some of the lowest salaries in the nation?

What about the miracle of big data?  What about VAM?  What about the soul-crush of Marzano? Isn’t it a “reform” imperative that legislators spend billions on these schemes and more to prove teacher “effectiveness?”

Fresen continues in the Times:

“By passing this bill, we will be able to attract and retain the highest quality teachers to our classrooms, make sure our colleges and universities are equipping students for success in the workforce, and create more world class universities by providing additional support to our emerging preeminent schools.”

That last bit is really confusing. Apparently the Florida Legislature is unaware that many top colleges and universities are moving away from requiring standardized tests for admission. They are rejecting what Frank Bruni called in the New York Times an “admissions process that warps the values of students drawn into a competitive frenzy.”

Blogger Nancy Bailey writes in her post, Could Changing College Admissions be the end of High- Stakes Testing?, that one of several conclusions drawn in Harvard’s Turning the Tide study, includes the goal of changing college admissions to “de-emphasize standardized testing, which could include making SAT and ACT optional.”

Last year veteran Sen. Nancy Detert was clear about the Best & Brightest bonus when she said, “we refused to hear it because it’s stupid.” This year, Sen. Legg sponsored SB 978, the companion to Best & Brightest and voted against his own bill in the K-12 Committee while Sen. Detert voted yes, keeping it alive as a bargaining chip.

Let’s hope someone with real common sense stops the Best & Brightest from becoming a permanent law based on a thin political “opinion.”