The Senate’s key player in the movement to reform teacher pay said Friday that there are still several major issues that the Legislature needs to resolve before pushing forward, including how it will fund merit pay and how teachers of special needs children will be evaluated.
“I think this is a complex piece of legislation and sometimes it’s not made in a year,” said state Sen. Steve Wise, R-Jacksonville, the chair of the Senate PreK-12 Education Committee.
Wise and fellow committee member Sen. Bill Montford, D-Tallahassee, took three hours of testimony at an open workshop on teacher quality Friday after a week of committee meetings designed to get the ball rolling on the legislation. Wise said he hopes to have a bill before the full Senate in the second or third week of March.
Republican lawmakers attempted to push through a teacher performance pay bill last year that partially tied pay to test results, but it was met with a firestorm of criticism from teachers around the state who said the proposal was unfair to educators. Originally a fan of the proposal, former Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed the bill, citing concerns over fairness to teachers, whose support was critical in his U.S. Senate race, which he ultimately lost to Republican Marco Rubio.
Gov. Rick Scott supports the concept and several lawmakers promised the issue of merit pay and teacher tenure would return this spring.
A draft circulated by Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Florida’s Future a few months ago would put a newly hired teacher on a probationary contract, under which the teacher could be fired at any time during the first year. For the next three years, teachers would be placed on annual contracts that would be evaluated at the end of each school year. After that, teachers would be offered three-year professional contracts.
Scott told reporters Friday he supports the idea of performance pay for teachers, but also believes that a fair measurement system needs to be developed first. Scott’s daughter is a special education teacher.
“As you know, I believe we’ve got to make sure we keep the best teachers around,” he said. “One of my daughters is a teacher. So we’ve got to pay the best teachers the most. So we need to have a fair measurement system.”
Wise said all of those issues would likely be included in a final proposal, but details still have to be worked out, particularly how special education teachers should be evaluated, an issue brought up by several educators who attended the meeting.
“The issue has always been a difficult one for me,” he said.
Megan Allen, the 2010 Florida Teacher of the Year who teaches in Hillsborough County, told lawmakers she has been teaching for seven years and this has been her most difficult year yet, particularly in teaching students with special needs.
“I have struggled with my students, but I’m learning,” she said.
Allen said a merit pay system could work, but urged lawmakers to provide local control options because the needs of students in one county likely wouldn’t match the needs of students in another. Teachers, therefore, should not be graded by the same rubric.
“We must take into account the needs of our districts and realize one size doesn’t fit all,” she said.
Lawmakers must also work out how to pay for a performance pay system. The state’s Race to the Top money will help some districts put into place a system to evaluate educators, but the federal program does not provide dollars for a salary bump. There is a limited pool of state money for districts that want to participate in merit pay, but it is likely not enough for statewide participation.
Union officials have noted that so far the process of hammering out a piece of legislation has been collaborative, compared to last year when members of the Florida Education Association said they were shut out of negotiations regarding the bill. Anger over the exclusion led teachers to send floods of letters and emails to lawmakers last spring and to show up in large numbers at legislative meetings.
Connie Milito, a lobbyist for the Hillsborough County School District, said that lawmakers need to overcome teachers’ anger over the process last year, if they want to be successful in passing legislation this session.
“What everybody’s afraid of is not being a part of the solution,” she said.
By Kathleen Haughney
