Florida Gov. Rick Scott Thursday signed the teacher merit pay bill, the first piece of legislation he has signed into law since becoming governor. Schools are given three years to set up new teacher evaluation systems tied to test scores. That provision of the law goes into effect July 2014.
The following statements by education policy experts at The Heartland Institute may be used for attribution. For further comments, refer to the contact information below or contact Jim Lakely, director of communications at The Heartland Institute, at [email protected] or 312/377-4000.
“Excellent teachers should be rewarded for excellent work, and poor teachers should be encouraged to find another line of work altogether. Whether SB 736 accomplishes that goal remains to be seen, obviously. But it’s a scandalous fact that a teacher in Florida could earn what amounts to lifetime tenure after three years of ‘satisfactory’ performance evaluations.
“The current ‘satisfactory’ standard is anything but that. You had 99 percent of teachers earn a ‘satisfactory’ evaluation in 2009 and 2010, while half of Florida’s high school students, 35 percent of middle schoolers, and 30 percent of elementary pupils failed to make a year’s worth of progress in reading. That’s not satisfactory. That’s an outrage.”
Ben Boychuk
Managing Editor, School Reform News
Research Fellow for Education Policy
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
818/389-2931
“Merit pay for teachers is one of the first, but very important, steps in transforming education from an employment/compensation-centered to a child/learning-centered education system.”
Bruno Behrend
Director, Center for School Reform
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
“Florida’s new teacher merit pay bill fails to address the root, or many roots, of the problem in public education. Forcing on public education a heavy-handed, arbitrary metric for successful instruction implies that the failures of education can be attributed to too little government intervention – a notion that is patently false. Florida should work to increase competition and localize control over the reins of education, not increase a bureaucratic, top-down approach.”
Marc Oestreich
Legislative Analyst
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
The Heartland Institute is a 27-year-old national nonprofit organization based in Chicago. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our Web site at http://www.heartland.org or call 312/377-4000.
Jim Lakely is the Vice President and Director of Communications of The Heartland Institute.
