Consider the fate awaiting future teachers under legislation known as Senate Bill 6 that has been approved by the Senate and is to be voted upon by the full House of Representatives. The bill means no job security, half of your annual evaluation and all of your recertification capabilities tied to students' standardized test performance, no incentive for obtaining advanced degrees and, oh, yeah, no salary increases for the foreseeable future. That's because 5 percent of the annual school district budget must be set aside for a performance fund and for developing the tests needed to measure students' progress.
How much is 5 percent? If you use the overall Hernando School District budget of $209 million, that's nearly $10.5 million. Or, take the amount of the general fund set aside for teaching and school-based programs, $148 million, and you still have to come up with $7.4 million to implement SB 6.
It's an exorbitant figure magnified by 67 school districts that must devise and implement start-of-the-school-year and end-of-the-school-year tests for every subject at every grade level to gauge student learning.
Forget teaching. With tens of millions of dollars floating around every school district, the offspring need to become test developers. Imagine the person who must devise a measurement for Duck, Duck, Goose proficiency among kindergarten pupils. Someone's going to have to do it since kindergarten physical education standards will get the same level of scrutiny as fourth-grade writing and eighth-grade science.
TampaBay.com