Here’s an update on a kooky new plan that I wrote about in Florida to spend $44 million to award big bonuses to teachers who got high SAT or ACT scores before they went to college — even if they took the test decades ago. (Fine way to spend millions of public dollars, don’t you think?)
Jeffrey S. Solocheck wrote in this Tampa Bay Times story that the Florida’s Best and Brightest Teacher Scholarships didn’t actually make it through the Republican-led Senate during the legislature’s spring session, but, somehow, was resurrected in a June special session and was included in the 2015-16 Florida education spending budget. To qualify for bonuses of up to $10,000 a teacher “must receive a ‘highly effective’ evaluation rating and have scored at or above the 80th percentile on the SAT or ACT they took in high school,” the story says, and, “for new teachers, just the test score would count.”
It’s just too bad for teachers who never took the SAT or ACT, such as Faye Cook, a fifth-grade teacher at Wilson Elementary in Plant City, who gets top evaluations, but started her college career at a community college, which did not require either college entrance exam. Cook is a fine teacher who used to get a state-funded bonus for earning National Board certification — but she doesn’t anymore because the state decided that program wasn’t worth funding.
Many teachers have attacked the program for a number of reasons, including that single test scores aren’t representative of what an individual knows or can do, and that the state has better things to do with the money.
Now Solocheck has a follow-up story, saying that a lot of teachers in Florida — despite the criticism of the scholarship fund — have sought to find out how they can apply. But he also wrote about veteran Pasco County teacher Celeste Richter, a highly rated AP government teacher who doesn’t want to be part of the program. She is quoted as saying:
“I refuse. A test I took in 1991 is not valid to say what a quality educator I am…. As a moral principle, I don’t believe this is an effective way to reward teachers for a good job”
Richter, who is starting her 19th year as a teacher, remembers that she did well on her SATS but won’t bother looking them up to apply.
Solocheck’s story says:
Lawmakers put $44 million into the program, modeling it for 4,400 teachers. But they also stipulated that the award would be prorated based upon the final number of teachers who qualify. In 2013-14, the last available data, more than 68,000 Florida teachers were evaluated as “highly effective.”If 20 percent of them had SAT or ACT scores in the 80th percentile or higher, as required, the bonus would drop by two-thirds. That doesn’t count new teachers, who don’t have to show evaluation results.
Every time you think you’ve seen it all, something happens and you realize things can always get worse.
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