Students will lose under teacher merit pay plan
To the editor:
What is going on?
Why are the people and students being shortchanged while politicians fight among themselves? How can Health Care and now the Education Bill pass along party lines? This surely means that many politicians are voting for party and not what they truly feel and the public loses again. Teachers will be avoiding Florida in droves, Merit pay will be implemented without being funded, students will have even more testing, and districts will have to create new tests with no funding. Students are losing and parents are being shortchanged on a well-rounded education. Advance degrees now mean nothing and experience does not matter (yes, this is in the legislation word for word). Meanwhile creativity goes out the window as we teach to more and more tests. Education ranking in Florida has gone from 31 to 10 in three years (Education Weekly), sorry not good enough. Florida was one of only nine states to achieve significant increases in eighth grade reading scores, while our fourth-graders continue to outpace their national counterparts in reading by a large margin (NAEP), sorry not good enough. Let’s lose our apathy and stand up now before all common sense evaporates.
Tim Loughren
Cape Coral