Gov. Charlie Crist enthralled Florida's teachers unions when he vetoed Senate Bill 6. Whether he impressed the Obama Administration remains to be seen.
The Florida Department of Education this week is preparing the state's second run for Race to the Top funding. The federal initiative will award $700 million in grants to states that implement education reforms.
Florida finished fourth in the initial phase of the competition; only the two top-ranked states -- Tennessee and Delaware -- received funding in that round.
With second-round submissions due in Washington June 1, Florida school districts have been asked to support the state's new application. As of Tuesday afternoon, 59 of 67 districts had signed on. More were expected to join during school board meetings last night. Tuesday was the state's deadline for districts to act.
A lack of consensus on teacher-compensation issues may have hampered Florida's first-round application. That simmering disagreement exploded in Tallahassee last month when teachers unions prevailed on Crist to veto Senate Bill 6.
SB 6, authored by state Sen. John Thrasher, R-Jacksonville, would have enacted several education reforms, including performance-based pay for teachers and the abolition of tenure for newly hired instructors.
After his veto, Crist convened a Race to the Top Working Group to marshal the state's second RTTT application.
Mark Pudlow, spokesman for the Florida Education Association, said the new version is "significantly" different.
"This agreement is voluntary for districts and unions, targets the lowest 5 percent of schools and guarantees bargaining collaboration for all new grant issues," Pudlow said.
He added, "It allows for incremental steps through beta testing, which is a system allowing for continuous improvement through ongoing evaluation, adjustment, and budget allocation with eventual roll-out to the entire school system as funding is available."
The new voluntary version calls for staff evaluations to be locally negotiated within the framework of 50 percent based on student achievement; 30 percent of which is based on state-approved tests and end-of-course exams and 20 percent based on locally defined criteria.
"The locally developed evaluation system should lead to the performance award and be phased in by the end of the grant period in 2014," Pudlow said.
Local teachers unions backed the revamped program in all but 12 counties where school boards voted support. Only five local unions supported the first-round submission.
Though the FEA vehemently opposed SB 6's more sweeping approach, reformers say Florida's grant chances won't improve if it is perceived that the state is watering down its efforts through narrow, voluntary participation.
They note that Tennessee and Delaware both incorporated performance-pay components similar to SB6 in their winning RTTT applications, and they point out that 60 Florida school districts signed onto the state's first application.
Indeed, Hillsborough County schools received a $100 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for a performance-based compensation program that encompassed teachers and principals.
"It does essentially what Race to the Top would do, working hand in glove with the teachers union," said Sen. Steve Wise, R-Jacksonville.
In fact, several districts, including Hillsborough, already had performance-pay programs under a 1999 state statute authorizing such systems.
Critics of the performance-pay push say it's no coincidence that Georgia and Florida, which finished third and fourth and out of the money in the first round, failed to get union buy-in to their RTTT applications.
Then again, placing fourth in a national competition isn't exactly a poor showing. And U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has challenged states to be bold in their approach to tightening teacher standards.
Duncan, for example, supported a Rhode Island district's decision to fire every teacher at the failing Central Falls High School. (The district later agreed to rehire the instructors in exchange for certain contractual reforms.)
In the RTTT rating system, 138 points of a possible 500 are awarded based on a state's commitment to eliminate seniority-based compensation and permanent job security (tenure). Florida garnered 431 points in its initial submission.
Diane Ravich, a former U.S. Department of Education official, criticizes both RTTT and the testing programs on which it is based. She believes teachers will suffer as a result.
"Teachers thought that President Obama would break free from the test-based accountability of No Child Left Behind, and now they realize that he plans to apply even tougher penalties based on test scores.
"Many of them know how phony the tests are even Secretary Arne Duncan has said that the current generation of state tests are bad yet the fate of teachers will now rest on these same inadequate tests," Ravich said.
All in all, Duncan and the Obama administration in their Race to the Top appear to be distancing themselves from a loyal and longtime Democratic Party constituency, the teacher unions.
The American Federation of Teachers, acknowledging the changing political realities, has supported selected performance-pay programs in Washington, D.C., Colorado and elsewhere.
Yet the larger National Education Association and its affiliates remain unreconstructed skeptics of such initiatives. In that respect, and in the ultimate irony, Thrasher and the Republican Party of Florida are more closely aligned to Obama & Co. than is the NEA.
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Contact Kenric Ward at kward@sunshinestatenews.com or (772) 559-4719.
