Florida Gov. Rick Scott delivered the State of the State Address to the Legislature on the opening day of its session Tuesday, stressing jobs and education. Here are his remarks on education, as prepared for delivery:

Our work to cut spending and live within our means over the last two years has allowed us to once again invest in education.

The workers of tomorrow are in Florida classrooms today.

When I first stood before you in 2011, I said, “The single most important factor in student learning is the quality of teaching.”

Since that time, we eliminated teacher tenure. We signed performance pay into law, and it will take effect in 2014.

Florida’s education system is making tremendous progress, due in large part to our great teachers and the work begun by Governor Bush and many in this legislature.

Our students and teachers were recently ranked sixth for educational quality; and our fourth-graders scored among the highest in the world on a recent reading evaluation.

Accountability is working.

The best way we can build on this progress is to reward our hard-working teachers with a $2,500 pay raise.

Some say they are afraid that giving raises to all teachers may mean that a teacher doing a bad job gets rewarded. But, thanks to our work, we are now in a better position than ever before to reward good teachers and move bad teachers out of the classroom.

We don’t want a war on teachers; we want a war on failure. (more…)

This recent speech is 22 minutes long, but Michael Johnston's stories about Tasha and Flavio make it worth every second. Johnston is the Democratic state senator from Colorado who made a name for himself last year when he led the charge to overhaul teacher pay and tenure. He's also a former teacher and principal, and a Teach for America alum. He delivered this gem - a Forbes columnist called it the "best speech about education -- ever" - at a TFA benefit dinner. Get the tissues now. These words in particular will sear themselves deep: "You think I can have that?"

Carl Hiaasen on Amendment 8. He doesn’t like it, says it’s about vouchers. It’s hard to take exception with the legend who created Skink, but for what it’s worth, here again is our take.

A campaign ad that “sounds indefensible.” From the Orlando Sentinel: “A group supporting Republican state Rep. Scott Plakon’s re-election bid is sending last-minute advertisements that attempt to link Plakon’s opponent, Democrat Karen Castor Dentel, to convicted child sex predator Jerry Sandusky.” Castor Dentel, the daughter of former state education commissioner Betty Castor, is a public elementary school teacher who opposed the 2011 law overhauling teacher tenure. Plakon said the ad “sounds indefensible.”

Florida lags with mainstreaming. Students with disabilities, particularly those with autism and emotional problems, are less likely to be mainstreamed in Florida than their counterparts in most other states, the Orlando Sentinel reports.

Charter school applications in Duval. Six more are on the table for a board vote today. Superintendent Ed Pratt-Dannals is recommending four for approval, two for denial, the Florida Times Union reports.

Funding, fairness. In an op-ed for the Fort Myers News Press, Lee County Superintendent Joseph P. Burke says the state needs to restore education funding to 2006-7 levels and suggests charter schools should have to play by the same rules on class-size requirements.

Absentee voter fraud. A school board election in Madison County is behind the state's longest-running case of absentee voter fraud, the Tampa Bay Times reports.

Michelle Rhee calls herself a “very, very, lefty liberal.” So what is she doing at the RNC in Tampa?

Building bridges.

“Despite the fact that I hold Democratic views on a lot of things, what I have found in my work on education advocacy and policy is that I often times find myself agreeing with, and getting the support of, Republicans,” she told redefinED after sharing the stage Tuesday with Jeb Bush. “And if I was a partisan person, then I would sort of eschew them and say no. But I’m about getting things done for kids. I’m about pushing policies that are in the best interest of children, and I honestly do not think we can accomplish that if we’re going to sort of stay on our side of the aisle. It has to be a bipartisan movement to do that.”

You can hear the full interview by clicking on the link below, but here are highlights:

On a centrist coalition in education: “Over the last five years or so, I have developed lots of good, strong working relationships with Republicans. And when I hear them talk in those meetings, I learn about what their priorities are and kind of what they want to do, and then I also go back to my own party and have those same discussions. There’s not a lot of difference between the two. And so, I know right now where the federal government is, is sort of you know, everyone’s staking out their positions and holding firm to those, but I actually think education could be the place where it would make the most sense for everyone to come together.”

On convincing other Democrats: “The only way to do that is to bring the conversation back to the level of children. And to ask people questions about what they would want for their own kids. Because if you go to any Democratic (function) – and trust me I go to a lot of Democratic circles and I talk about this stuff – and you bring up vouchers, people just go nuts. Or charter schools. Or even teacher tenure, you know. ‘Ohh, I can’t touch that.’ But if you take it down to the level of, ‘Okay, so if your child was in an ineffective teacher’s classroom, you’re just saying then that that would be ok? That would be okay if that teacher stays in the classroom the next year and your younger kid might get (placed there)?” They would say absolutely no way.”

On Obama’s education policies: “He has really been, I think, incredibly impressive. I never thought that I would live to see the day that a Democrat, a high-profile Democrat, much less a Democratic African-American president, saying the things he’s saying. He says I support the growth and expansion of charter schools. I support merit pay for teachers. We should recognize and reward the best teachers and for ineffective teachers, you need to find a new job. Those are the sorts of things that Democrats have never said.”

Apart from Jeb Bush's comments at a panel discussion yesterday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie offered the RNC's most extensive comments yet on education in a speech late last night. Full speech here. Coverage here. Education excerpts here:

They said it was impossible to touch the third rail of politics. To take on the public sector unions and to reform a pension and health benefit system that was headed to bankruptcy.

With bipartisan leadership we saved taxpayers $132 billion over 30 years and saved retirees their pension.

We did it.

They said it was impossible to speak the truth to the teachers union. They were just too powerful.  Real teacher tenure reform that demands accountability and ends the guarantee of a job for life regardless of performance would never happen.

For the first time in 100 years with bipartisan support, we did it. (more…)

After more than a decade working in education reform I learned long ago that if I stopped to kick every snapping dog along the pathway, I would never arrive where I needed to go. But every now and then I read something, such as Diane Ravitch’s latest op-ed on CNN.com, and have to take a breath and ask “Really?” One of my earliest resources as I was starting in education reform back around 2000 was her book, “Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms.” But now it appears she’s utterly abandoned that historical analysis in favor of status quo incrementalism and apologies for failure.

Let’s just think about Dr. Ravitch’s assertions:

The NAEP test scores of American students are at their highest point in history: for black students, white students, Hispanic students, and Asian students.

They are at their highest point in history in fourth grade and in eighth grade, in reading and math.

I tend to agree with Dr. Ravitch that the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test is the most valid measure of academic performance. But why is that? Primarily, as my American Center for School Choice colleague, Alan Bonsteel, recently reminded us, it is because most states have catered to their own self-interest, aligning examinations to weak standards to give the appearance of academic achievement rather than actually increasing the amount of learning necessary for student success in this century. So for most of the last 10 years, under No Child Left Behind, we permitted widespread creation of dysfunctional and often meaningless standards aligned to dysfunctional and meaningless tests. Logically, this history does not make for a persuasive indictment of the value of legitimate standards and assessment tools.

But beyond that, let’s look at Dr. Ravitch’s assertion:

The “highest point in history” while true, is relative to what?

 

 

 

With the exception of the Asian/Pacific Islander group, I doubt anyone is throwing a parade for the educational system’s accomplishments over the last 20 years. Are 7-point gains over 20 years for African-Americans and Hispanics and a 9-point gain for white students really the kind of progress we expect after multiple billions of real increased educational spending? Yet this seems to be what Dr. Ravitch finds acceptable performance. (more…)

At every crossroads toward the future, it’s been said, tradition will post 10,000 people to guard the past. For frustrated Californians that see the need for significant change in the education system, a major number of those guardians are found in California’s Democratic-controlled legislature and the California Teachers Association (CTA), which is the state’s largest political contributor. Unfortunately, the problems are not new. I wrote at length on the terrible effects of California’s teacher employment laws and practices back in 2005, attacking tenure, seniority, and the evaluation and compensation systems as damaging to students. The depth of dysfunction in California has been documented repeatedly, perhaps most thoroughly in the 2007 “Getting Down to Facts” report, issued by Stanford University’s Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice.

One of the key conclusions of the report, based on 22 separate studies it commissioned, was this: Current teacher policies do not let state and local administrators make the best use of the pool of potential teachers nor adequately support current teachers.

Five years later and with virtually no changes to teacher employment, compensation, dismissal, or tenure laws or practices - and no hope of any legislation passing - California’s reformers are following in the steps of great civil rights movements and seeking relief from the courts. In October 2011, a group of families, with support from EdVoice, sued the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to force compliance with a mostly ignored California law known as the Stull Act, which mandates among other things that teacher evaluations occur regularly and that they include student performance data.

Even the current LAUSD superintendent admitted in his deposition that “the current system doesn’t best serve adults or students” and does not focus on “the whole part of an education, and that is how students do.” Now the Democratic mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, has jumped in on the side of the families, filing a friend-of-the court brief insisting on change and noting that LAUSD only evaluated 40 percent of tenured teachers and 70 percent of non-tenured teachers. Moreover, the district’s own task force found “only a tenuous link between evaluations and improved teaching and learning.”

Last month, my colleague at the American Center for School Choice, Steve Sugarman, analyzed the current Reed vs. State of California case that is, at least so far, defeating the “last in, first out” hiring practices that the CTA advocates and most school districts adopt. This policy leads to disproportionate firing of teachers in schools that serve poor neighborhoods and operate in difficult urban areas because the seniority policies of unions and districts place the newly hired teachers at these schools. Thus the trial court found the practice unconstitutionally deprives students of an equal education.

Just last week, lawyers filed on behalf of eight teenage students across the state a third attack on the teaching status quo that demonstrably damages kids. (more…)

Don’t like what an education reformer has to say? Just call them a teacher basher.

Increasingly, that’s what teachers and others are doing, with this recent blog post on CNN – “When did teacher bashing become the new national pastime?” – being the latest in a long list of examples.

Most of these articles set out straw men. There’s the frequent assertion that we only want to judge teacher performance by one standardized test score (few do). And another that teachers simply face an impossible job with students who are too damaged or too unmotivated to learn (a myth Education Trust dispelled long ago.) Most reformers assert quite properly that a teacher is the heart of the education system and the key to improving it. They should be treated better. They should be valued more highly. But the conundrum seems to be that teachers just don’t seem to believe that anyone can fairly measure what they do, so they collectively have resisted all efforts to implement meaningful performance standards. I find that odd, however, because I have never met a teacher who couldn’t tell me in a couple of minutes who the best and worst teachers in the school are

If we assume a good teacher enables a student to advance quickly and a poor teacher does the opposite, then it becomes difficult to dispute that the teaching profession is horribly broken. (more…)

The Florida House today passed a landmark teacher pay and tenure bill -- one Gov. Rick Scott said he will sign it into law -- but one evaluation remains overlooked. Under the bill, parents could get a report card on their own student’s teacher.

The disclosure provision in SB 736 is narrowly drawn: “Each school district shall annually report to the parent of any student who is assigned to a classroom teacher … having two consecutive annual performance evaluation ratings of unsatisfactory, two annual performance evaluation ratings of unsatisfactory within a 3-year period, or three consecutive annual performance evaluation ratings of needs improvement …”

So this particular public rating is a distant cousin to the kind of value-added performance database of 6,000 third- through fifth-grade Los Angeles school teachers that was constructed and published last fall by the Los Angeles Times. First, no one will be rated and ranked. Second, no one’s teaching ability will be reduced to a numerical score. Third, this will draw on multiple years’ worth of evaluation. Fourth, this disclosure will be limited to teachers who have been judged as poorly performing.

Still, this is a significant step. It will give parents information that puts teachers on the spot, which will probably give pause to both. The ticklish part here is that evaluations will always be flawed to some degree, and we still are learning how best to deal with classroom factors such as student absenteeism or mobility, parental support, and the disadvantages of poverty. We’re still calibrating how to assess team teaching or courses, such as art and physical education, that are not as easily assessed.

These evaluations are sufficiently complex that they might be best offered with a warning label for parents. But they do have intrinsic value and play a constructive role in a public education system that keeps inviting parents to take advantage of different learning options and to find the right match for their children. This kind of data is also destined, much like the comparative performance scores that were revealed by the No Child Left Behind Act, to lead us to a greater understanding of what happens in the classroom. That’s never bad.

Andrew Rotherham, in his weekly Time.com column, explores the move among many states to reform laws governing teacher tenure. But when weighing ending the practice of tenure altogether or at least expediting the process of removing teachers guilty of misconduct from the classroom, Rotherham's commentary takes an intriguing turn toward teacher empowerment (redefinED host Doug Tuthill similarly framed the issue last month):

... both these approaches reinforce an underlying problem in that they basically treat all teachers alike. Why not look to empower teachers and administrators by giving them the ability to negotiate more flexible contracts? Let school districts act more like professional sports franchises so they can protect and incentivize the talent they most want to hold onto. Contracts could offer more than monetary incentives. Excellent teachers could be protected from layoffs, for example, or given enhanced professional development experiences. Most of us are not professional athletes, but you see the same approach in a variety of workplaces all the time.