Nix Six

South Florida Teachers Call in Sick to Protest Bill Six.

Go them! Really, as if the Florida education system couldn't get any worse. The FCAT assumes a one-size fits-all style of learning that doesn't work for every student. Furthermore, the majority of the kids who fail the exams are living at or below the poverty line without a support system outside of school. Teachers, the american public seems to forget, are not substitutes for mom and dad - once their students go home, they have no control over what happens to them.

My aunt works at an inner-city elementary school. More than half the students who come into her class are not reading at level at the start of the school year - this isn't her fault. But the expectation that she will undo eight years of neglect and get these kids up to speed in the course of eight months is unrealistic - A class of fifteen to twenty, at least eight of whom are basically guaranteed not to pass the FCAT, combined with kids with learning disabilities and behavioral problems...

In the words of my 11th grade math teacher, "Some days I want to go flat out crazy so they'll give me a cushy job at the book depository." The problems with the FL education system don't start with the teachers. They start with a bunch of bureaucrats being paid too much to push paper around Mr. H. reckoned that if you cut out all the people whose jobs are basically to do nothing, you'd save millions of dollars a year.

Despite the fact that desegregation was carried out with a vengeance in the 60s, Florida schools are still largely, unofficially segregated. When you have a high school that is 90% anything, whether that 90% is a bunch of rich white kids or made up of the urban poor, what you have is not an "integrated" population, because the lines of race and economics are enforced by the zoning.

Anyone can teach in a classroom full of well-behaved WASPs. But driving, day after day, into the sketchiest part of town, to teach a rowdy bunch of fourth graders how to read is a calling. Grade-based pay will only serve to discourage teachers from taking jobs at poor, urban schools where, despite their credentials, they will be subjected to wages even more lousy than what they already earn. The fact is that Freedom Writers and Dangerous Minds are more fiction than fact. It is unrealistic to expect teachers to be able to "fix" kids in a single year who the system has failed since pre-kindergarden, but grade-based pay will serve only to discourage them from even trying.