by Kathleen Haughney
The News Service of Florida
The Florida Senate is set to vote Wednesday on a flurry of education reform measures that could change the face of public education in Florida.
Teachers could see pay raises based on student test results. Students would have to take harder classes to graduate. Classroom sizes could grow. And a statewide voucher program could be expanded.
Republican leaders have signaled from the beginning of the session that they would be pushing several of these initiatives over the objections of Democrats and some education advocates. The state Department of Education also has supported the initiatives.
The merit pay for teachers, especially, has gained significant attention both as a major shift in policy and as a political fight. The measure, SB 6, a pet proposal of former Gov. Jeb Bush, is sponsored by Sen. John Thrasher (R-St. Augustine), who doubles as the head of the state Republican Party.
The bill’s major opponent is the Florida Education Association, which financed the 2002 gubernatorial campaign of Bill McBride against Bush and has routinely fought with Republican lawmakers over education policies.
But the proposal is also an important part of the state’s Race to the Top application, a bid for about $1 billion in federal grant money out of a $4.35 billion pot. The application indicated the state would move toward merit pay and lawmakers wanted to move that way ahead of time to help make the state’s case for money.
“The bill puts education and the educational focus on what’s best for students,” Thrasher said.
The bill puts teachers on annual contracts and forces the Department of Education to implement some method to gauge whether students made learning gains over the school year. While county school boards would still set teacher salaries, annual raises would have to be based on these new state performance standards.
But no other state has implemented a merit pay system and the department has not yet determined how it would measure student progress for those purposes, an issue worrying some lawmakers who warned that it could have unintended consequences.
“This is not about leading the nation, this is about being the canary in the mineshaft,” said Sen. Dan Gelber (D-Miami Beach).
The heightened graduation standards, SB 4, are also contentious and a part of the Race to the Top application. That bill would eventually require students to take geometry, two years of algebra, biology, chemistry or physics and an additional “rigorous” science course in order to graduate. Department of Education officials would also create and eventually implement end-of-course exams.
The two bills have been strongly opposed by the state teachers’ union and Senate Democrats who have pledged that the bigger education problem in the state was the lack of education funding. Education spending has decreased over the past few years and lawmakers have not yet hammered out an agreement for the 2010 school year spending.
The Senate is proposing a $6,881 per pupil in spending, but the House is looking at $6,835 in per student spending.
But Republicans in both chambers have been intent on pushing the reform bills as a top educational priority.
Mark Pudlow, spokesman for the state teachers’ union, said those two changes are being pushed through very quickly with little thought about potential consequences.
“I just think this is a radical transformation of education in Florida,” he said. “All of these things are happening too quickly.”
The two other changes, class size and vouchers, have also been hotly debated.
The Senate, which has struggled over the class size issue since its 2002 inception, will vote to ask Florida residents to roll back changes made in the 2002 Constitution to cap individual classrooms at a certain number of students. The constitution currently caps individual classes at 18 students for kindergarten through third grade, 22 in fourth through eighth grade, and 25 in high school, at the start of next school year. The change, SJR 2, proposed by Sen. Don Gaetz (R-Niceville), would eliminate the hard caps for individual classes and allow the caps to be calculated at a grade-wide average for schools.
Gaetz said the hard caps on individual classrooms were too rigid and that education officials believed that if a student moved into a district and put a classroom over the cap, the school would be in violation of the law. He added that lawmakers and state lawyers had been looking for ways other than a constitutional amendment to make the law more flexible, but could not find one.
“If there was another way, believe me it would have been found,” Gaetz said.
The final bill, SB 2126, that is part of the educational package is a measure that would expand the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, a voucher program that allows companies to make a donation to the scholarship in exchange for tax credits. Public school advocates argue that the measure takes away money from public schools, but proponents say parents should have the right to send their kids to the school of their choosing.
“I just want to make sure that we have school choice for everyone not just people of means,” said Sen. Joe Negron (R-Stuart), the bill sponsor.
All of the bills could come up for a final vote Wednesday in the Senate. The House has yet to hold its own floor debate on the measures, though all are considered likely to pass in both chambers.