20 some years ago, Florida Legislation created the "School Advisory Councils" to run schools locally by parents, community businesses and members, students, and school teachers and staff (not just the principals). Their task was to write the annual "School Improvement Plan" (SIP) - a living, changing document that describes the school locally (as a local, small entity versus the BIG incomprehensible system) AND the school budget.
The SIP was to make annual adjustments to the curricular and cultural (safety, etc) components of the school by the local experts (named above).
The budget was to be developed to enact the SIP.
The task of educating the children of our community was to be shared between all stakeholders. School Advisory Councils (SACs) were the instrument by which “the whole village” was “to raise the child.”
Current legislation proposed by Florida Senator Thrasher (SB 6) and passed by the Florida Senate last Wednesday and embodied in HB7189 essentially isolates the teachers and principals of schools as the primary parties responsible for a child’s education.
SB 6/HB7189's ridiculous implication is that the parents, community, and students themselves identified in the earlier legislation establishing SACs have little to do with a child's progress.
SB6/HB7189 suggests that if teacher and principal salaries are threatened, teachers will somehow find a magic bullet that parents, teachers and administrators together have not been able to find.
By threatening to raise the taxes of the individual communities who resist this legislation, the Senators avoid blame for the consequences of this radical change, shifting their blame to the individual School Boards. The Senate bill essentially holds a loaded economic gun to the heads of our communities – “Do this, or pay.”
SB 6/HB7189 is an admission of the failure of both the state and the local school districts for making much of the provision for the SACs that would have, could have, turned schools around.
Perhaps the school districts were as mum as the law would allow them to be for reluctance of giving up central control of the schools. Poorly advertised – SACs are poorly attended and SIP's are no more than statistical tables of FCAT data only an actuary could appreciate.
SB 6/HB7189 is an admission of our failure as community members and parents for not showing up at the SAC meetings that, in spite of this poor advertisement, still convened.
Teachers and students have been left to themselves to teach/learn the burgeoning body of information, skills and values necessary to become a functional part of society.
Rather than participate in this process, society has gone so far as to undermine it by providing children with sundry digital toys and virtual reality escape vehicles – video games, internet access, hundreds of cable channels, iPods and cell phones - to both appease the adults' guilty conscience for neglecting children and of necessity - to babysit their children.
Institutional education won't "work" with clients that are so preoccupied that they will not study or discipline themselves - outside the classroom and now even in the classroom.
Lawmakers either do not understand the breakdown that I have described above or don't want to address it.
SB 6/HB7189 fails to address the problem.
Rather than bring attention back to the community as the SAC legislation did, back to the failure of our communities to prepare and present students ready for education on a DAILY basis - a failure that has produced the reality of distracted, unmotivated, defiant, truant, disrespectful and disruptive students - SB 6/HB7189 ignores the many factors that interfere with a teacher’s ability to instruct, assess, and assign appropriate grades.
In a tight economic climate and system where votes are bought by services provided, institutional education suffering from such socially rooted and complex problems is a losing proposition.
It is being systematically deconstructed and reassigned to private vendors to shift responsibility away from the government.
In Florida , this is facilitated by the fact that we have a majority conservative legislation whose leaning toward privatization is congruent with this effort.
Make no mistake, this bill, SB 6/HB7189, will no more fix public education than telling a drowning man to swim will save him.
What SB 6/HB7189 will do is first drive talented and in-demand teachers to other venues for their livelihood. Second, it will further villainize children who are rejecting as irrelevant the narrow curriculum and 1 dimensional assessments that are being tightened like nooses around the children’s and educator’s necks. We have already seen this happen with the implementation of FCAT – rather than addressing the issues that cause students to disengage, we find it more convenient to label them as criminals and to exit them from the classroom to the halls and from the school building to the streets.
The economic forces SB 6/HB7189 will impose will redefine “good” and “bad” in terms of success at testing. Any student who threatens the economic status of an educator will be exited from the system.
Our criminal population will swell.
The solution to our students’ rejection of institutional education is not SB 6/HB7189. SB 6/HB7189 needs to be vetoed this week by the Governorbefore irrevocable harm is done to the already strained local schools.
The real issues of student learning as affected by all segments of the local community must be addressed – and this through the vehicle that decades of legislation has established but that practice has ignored – the School Advisory Councils. The answer lies in convening town hall meetings on the small scale at each local school’s School Advisory Council. The answer is in you and I waking up tomorrow morning and saying “I’m going to make my community’s school a safe and healthy learning environment.” Then attending the next SAC meeting…and the next…
SB 6/HB7189 merely does what we in our communities have done for too long – shift the blame to others. Here it shifts it further from the community to solely the educators.
These are our children and they can learn, if we will not only encourage them to, but hand in hand with our neighbors, provide for them and require them to respectfully attend school, go to class, listen and participate, then return to loving and secure homes to study.
I disagree. Everyone who has to work in the private sector (of course there are exceptions) has to exhibit performance or face job loss.
Teachers ought to be the same way.
I agree parents need to be more involved. In fact, parents are the most important influence. But we cannot legislate moral parents. We CAN legislate rules for teachers, and we should.
One other option that would help: vouchers for parents to send their kids to schools that work. Make schools compete for students. Of course the unions oppose that too.
Another thing: encourage home schooling. Let parents who homeschool get a tax break. And teacher unions would oppose that as well.
Tenure is a bad idea. It encourages laziness.