Even with tenure, current teachers can be fired for a number of unlikely reasons–assorted crimes and misdeeds. Tenure just means they can’t be fired without cause.

Therefore, not definitely double-talk.

David for avoiding cause for termination

If this isn’t double-talk, I don’t know what is — keep tenure, but could still lose your job ????

By the way, would only those teachers whose subject area is tested via FCAT, et al, be endangered by student performance failure — or would ALL teachers be subject to losing their jobs?

Someone has got to do a lot of work to make this program work.

David knowing politicians will be paid by someone

Scott isn’t the Senate, the Senate isn’t Scott.

Usually when you have a Republican Governor and a majority Republican Senate, they will work together, but Scott forced himself on the party by getting the people to vote for him even though they wanted somebody else.

Their differences should make for some interesting times in the next few years.

David who voted for
Farid Khavari (Independent) Businessman & Economist
&
Darcy Richardson (Independent) Historian, Author, Financial Consultant
KNOWING THEY WOULD LOSE

Parents have abandoned a large part of the education process, and the children have not been held to a set standard for decades before the present laws went into place. Children, a product of our Society, seeing no compelling reason to participate in their education drop out at ridiculously high rates nation wide. And unionization has turned a “profession” into a “trade” and has served only to increase pay (without merit) and protect those that should be out of the teaching business.

It is sad to see students at the freshman level in college, unable to do anything productive academically, think, read, do assigned taks. They have floated like dross through a system where there has been no accountability for anyone. And sadly, parents and Society are largely to blame. The lack of a solid Moral Code is fundamental in all of this too. (Thanks to Liberal Moral Relativism, and “Mulitculturalism”)

It is well past time to change that, or our children, and their children will be in a land much different than the one we grew up in – a land of the Educated, and the Illiterati (thanks, MTV, modern media et al). A land of broken brains subject to the whims of whatever forces of change rule their lives in their future days and unable to cope for themselves.

Well said and your point is well taken.

That being said, your union has failed as has the state board of education; and, I might add, so has the Federal education department (whatever it’s called).

Sounds like it’s time to start over by letting those useless state and federal people go and hand off the running of local schools to local people.

I still do not agree that unions are good; never will.

What the unions (and the majority of teachers–union or not) want is a fair way to evaluate the teachers on what they do every day. One test, once a year cannot measure an effective teacher. I can teach my heart out all year long and be considered an “ineffective” teacher under the new plan if my students don’t score well on a test that I will have had no input into writing (and very likely won’t even know the true content of until the day of the test).

The only influence I have on my students is when they are in my classroom. I can’t go home with them to make sure they do their homework, sleep, get up on time, eat breakfast and make it to school. That is the parent’s job–and they don’t get evaluated on their children’s performance (or their own performance)–I do.