Florida passed a proposal to award $10,000 bonuses for teachers who are “the best and the brightest.” The cost: $44 million.
The awards would go either to teachers rated “highly effective” in raising test scores. New teachers would get the bonus if they had high SAT or ACT scores when they were high school seniors.
Florida eliminated bonuses for advanced degrees and for National Board Certification
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is obviously a Race to the (Foggy) Bottom , and Florida is currently in the lead, with NY a close second with New Orleans (who has entered their own runner) in third.
“There is obviously a Race to the (Foggy) Bottom. . .”
In constant sorrow no doubt, eh??
If only colleges and Universities would base their hiring on SAT scores rather than advanced degrees.
They could hire professors right out of high school.
Crap……SAT scores have nothing to do with being a good teacher. Teaching comes from passion and heart, not from scores. Flor-i-duh is acting stupid again.
TFA types won’t want to work for under $40,000 and that is what most Florida teachers make. Miami is ranked the 8th most expensive rental market and they have a large contract with TFA. This is just a way to keep the TFA teachers coming to Florida and now you will teachers with no experience making $10,000 more than 16 year veterans.
Great point! Most private section bonuses or options require a lengthy vesting period if performance based. Those rare signing bonuses are for labor market conditions. I think you have uncovered the game.
I’d say that’s pretty sccurate.
After passing an ALEC-written law last year forbidding districts from negotiating contracts that pay teachers based upon a longevity scale, as we’ve always done, now you either choose to freeze yourself at your current level of pay for the rest of your career and receive no more increases ever, or you sign up for the roller coaster pay scale that is based on VAM voodoo in the hopes that you get a good class that might score well so you can get a bonus.
We already have the potential for a new TFA teacher to make substantially more than a veteran teacher with advanced degrees and years of experience based upon test scores alone.
They are determined to crush unions and collective bargaining but ey can’t just outlaw it here because it is enshrined in our constitution. They instead come up with these ridiculous merit pay plans to degrade and humiliate teachers who don’t have the smarts to only teach in upper middle class white schools.
Chris,
“now you either choose to freeze yourself at your current level of pay for the rest of your career and receive no more increases ever, or you sign up for the roller coaster pay scale that is based on VAM voodoo in the hopes that you get a good class that might score well so you can get a bonus.”
What do most of the teachers you know do?
We’ve all chosen to keep our grandfathered pay rate. Once you give it up it never comes back and there is a real possibility of being knocked down a bunch of levels by a vindictive administrator if you get less than effective or highly effective.
Clear indication Fresen is not amongst the best and brightest. My scores eons ago might qualify but, frankly, there are better veteran teachers than I whom I have looked to for advice. They would not likely qualify based on their shared experiences. One of the best teachers I greatly respect was asked to leave high school and later became an exceptional teacher. ACT scores had nothing to do with it.
I am amazed at the goofiness of these legislators and shallow, simple minded approach to issues. How can so many get through law school or run a successful business yet demonstrate such thinking? Is it just hubris and ignorance? Absence of nuance?
I am amazed that you are amazed. 🙂
Such goofiness seems to be the rule rather than the exception — especially in Florida.
Ohio is no better. So surreal.
Fresen has ties to the Charter industry and he’s from Miami which is very expensive. Charters are having a hard time recruiting teachers so this helps staff his charters at the tax payers expense.
So he must not be a small gubbermint Republican.
Only people who so funda-mentally misunderstand the motivations for teaching would try to alter the motivations for teaching to the only in¢entive they understand.
This is why we can’t have nice teaching.
The testing industry is thrilled with this type of plan.
I keep remembering the old camp fire song which used our states, a question and answer kind of thing.
One question which seems MOST apropos now:
How did “Fora- die” boys, how did flora-die?
Seems like they are trying very hard to do exactly that.
Texas got rid of this idea years ago. I received bonus money several times. I did not change my teaching methods one bit. Just got lucky, I guess.
Has a correlation been established between high SAT scores and effective teaching? My English scores were high and my math scores were mediocre. I am an ESL teacher. I am now officially a bad teacher working in a bad school. I am clearly not amongst the best and the brightest.
WTF….is wrong with our politicians ??
In a nutshell…EVERYTHING!
Bright, young Floridians may get excited about the $10,000 bonus until they realize that the pay scale has very few bumps in it, and there are many more ways to get fired than rewarded in this “right to get fired” state.
If you have a good score, take the job for a year.
Kind of like a $250,000 bonus for helicopter training for three years of military service?
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-me-adv-gibill-20150315-story.html#page=1
Who thinks up these crazy taxpayer funded bonuses?
The lottery and gambling should be voluntary, not a societal endeavor. Jackpot bonuses are the mark of a failing society which is not building on fairness, equity, and the value of work.
Stupid is as stupid does…..
Bonuses instead of regular wage increases are a terrible deal for middle class employees, especially young people with all that student debt they’re carrying.
Middle class people need to leverage money over time and they need reliability rather than a shot at lottery winnings. It’s really the only shot they have for long range growth and planning, unlike, say, highly-paid executives or lobbyists who can make it a month what these people make in a year.
Why would the federal government be supporting policy that harms middle class workers with RttT funds? This is bad for our communities. It’s a private sector idea that shouldn’t spread. Are they that out of touch with average people?
Reject this, young people! Your government is giving you lousy financial advice.
http://time.com/3342841/bonus-bad-news/
A high school athlete with superior skills on the basketball court can transfer those same skill sets, to the same game, played on the familiar hardwood at the college level or in the NBA. The competition may be more intense, but the athlete relies on identical, muscle memory tasks, and knows that he/she must take ownership of his game.
Scoring high on SAT’s, and graduating college with a high GPA, means that you demonstrated an ability to navigate the system of “schooling.”
Most likely, you were intellectually adept at knowing what and how to study, learned from peers as well as the teacher, developed a familiarity with the ‘language’ and nuances of test questions, grew up in an environment that supported your learning (e.g. stellar record of school attendance, tutors, private school, home-school) and protected your well-being (e.g. scheduled visits to medical and dental professionals, and early intervention if a diagnosis of learning disabilities presented).
The issue of recent grads entering teaching without preparation, is highly problematic.
Propagandizing, that one’s SAT (as well as one’s GPA) predicts a successful teacher, commodifies grads, reduces them to a statistic, and is yet another policy and public relations attention gainer, that suggests that one’s success in the classroom is predictable.
But, there are many variables, usually 28-35 of them. Most show up on your first day, while others can enter at any time, when you are the teacher of record.
The SAT score means nothing when you are hired to teach a classroom full of children who cannot speak the language of the tests, need more than months of test prep to be considered ‘educated citizens,’ and do not learn, the same way that you do.
A classroom of children with special needs, including youngsters with emotional disabilities, may live in high poverty communities where basic homeostasis (safety,shelter, sustenance) is a daily challenge.
For many high achievers, school has always come easy for them. For more than a decade and a half, those who bypass preparation, repeat the same statement: they knew that they were ‘natural’ teachers, “I decided that I wanted to teach when I was tutoring other classmates in high school or college.” This usually was coupled with, “Leadership came naturally, too.”
I witnessed kindergarten students who reduced smart college graduates to tears, and high achieving biology majors, without any background in teaching children, to frustration when ‘kids don’t get the stuff I”m teaching, the first time.”
The most damaging actions come when unprepared college graduates (with high SAT’s and high GPA’s) are assigned to emotionally challenged learners. A colleague, assigned to mentor uncertified teachers, hired on state waivers to teach a 5th grade E.D. public school classroom, shared how the children were told, “No one is going to the lunchroom tomorrow, as a consequence of your behavior. ”
11 year old children with special needs were crying in the classroom, because of the actions of this teacher, which would in any private school environment, be deemed unprofessional, with bullying overtones.
The program that facilitates their presence in school districts around the country, would never tolerate that type of interaction if levied upon the children of their executive directors, nor the thousands of alumni, who are now parents.
To even consider that correlating an individual’s ability to process information, teach themselves, and navigate the culture of schooling, as the primary indicator of understanding the multi-tasking that teachers deal with every day outside of teaching content – limited resources, children entering schools without preschool experience, limited English language proficiency, families in transition, children in foster care, and community economics – suggests that policy makers consider a $10,000 signing bonus, a significant cost saving measure.
They place the social issues of communities, squarely on the shoulders of those trying to figure out teaching. Policymakers, have persisted in their claims that their actions, which fly in the face of educational equity, let alone the tenets of our national pledge of Allegiance’s line, “one nation under God with liberty and justice for all.”
This bonus should be offered to high school seniors in Florida, who dedicate themselves to majoring in education, to cover college tuition, with a requirement that they student teach, and then teach for three years, in a hard-to-staff district. Funds of 10,000 should be matched and offer mentorship to these novice teachers, who will then mentor the succeeding cohorts of incoming traditionally prepared teachers… who stay in teaching.
To offer a bonus based on high-school achievement (four years prior to completion of one’s undergraduate degree), appears to one again target those who enter the state– and teaching– on the fly.
My family has paid taxes to the state of Florida for sixty years. There should be more accountability by those who suggest policies that obscure all of the particulars. Don’t think that the Gold Coast communities would want less than the best for their own children and grandchildren, unless, of course, they sign up to do “service work, teaching poor children,” before launching their own career paths.
Is it a big surprise though? They measure everything with test scores. Seems natural to rank adults by scores in high school.
Wait until the character and grit scale comes out! 🙂
Ever wonder who has stock in the company that owns SAT? I do! Ever wonder whose jobs will no longer be? I do. Ever wonder why this country has a fetish for sorting, ranking, and labeling students and teachers? I do.
Want a change for SANITY rather than profits? I certainly do.
“Stupidity isn’t punishable by death. If it was, there would be a hell of a population drop.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, The Laughing Corpse
“Stupidity isn’t punishable by death”
Well, in some cases, it actually is.
And you can actually get an award for it, too. Posthumous, of course.
High SAT scores of high school students do not make them good teachers. This is a ridiculous waste of money, and an insult to teachers who get advanced degrees or have national board certification.
Yes, districts will be able to lure in new teachers with higher SAT scores with $10,000 signing bonuses, but when the rigors of teaching every day sets in, Florida will see its $44 million walk right out the door. The biggest cliché at the moment is that one of the purposes of education is to create the lifelong learner, but why should students strive for higher education when their own teachers are not valued for achieving years of expertise, higher degrees, and national board certifications? What value is there to becoming educated and entering the teaching field when all you have to do is sit through a series of training sessions with Teach for America in order to teach the neediest and most demanding students who deserve the most attention? Once again, politics and government are wasting tax payer’s dollars.
According to Education Week’s facts on Florida http://www.edweek.org/topics/states/florida/ there are 175,609 teachers in the state. The cap on this $10,000 bonus is 4,400 teachers in total which represents only 2% of Florida’s teaching population. If the program, goes over the 4,400, then each teacher will get less. The patient (public schools) is bleeding to death but don’t stop the bleeding – put a piece of toilet paper on a cut in the hope that this 2% will raise Florida test scores and graduation rates to new levels of achievement.
I am in the process of getting my masters so that I can be even more effective as an ESL teacher despite the “stats” that the level of my education has no effect whatsoever on my students’ test scores. If that is true, why is Florida paying bonuses to draw in “smarter” people into the classroom with or without degrees? Why worry about smarts? If that’s the case, let’s just have any Joe Schmoe off the street teach our students. Maybe he will do a better job and not ask to be paid for his work and tax payers can keep their money!
It’s all a republican ruse to destroy unions…TFA teachers by and large are going to be short termers who will feel less inclined to join teacher unions. I mean, come on, how many times have you watched veteran teachers be replaced with first year teachers, who get half the pay? These people often are too young to understand the importance of union membership. I know I didn’t truly understand all of this in my first few years. Now years later I am a union rep in my building. Destroy teacher unions and you have a clear path to charter schools/ private school vouchers. Destroy teacher unions and you are cutting off a major Democratic Party ally..THIS. Is what it’s all bout!
Democrats are in on this ruse. Arne Duncan also says that master’s degrees don’t matter, ignoring the research that is posted right on the government’s own Nation’s Report Card website. See data with graphs located here: http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_2011/
Can we please wake the hell up already! There is no difference between a Republican or a Democrat at all and to insist there is proves that you have been asleep at the wheel for way too long. No one has been more destructive to Public Education than Mr. Hope and Change and last time I checked he had a D in front of his name. In the end they are all lying thieving politicians and their party affiliation doesn’t amount to a damn thing.
Brightest and whitest… Tests were outlawed in the past as being discriminatory… And now are pushed by policy makers. Symbols like flags are not as critical for justice and democracy as instruments used to maintain privilege.
How much of SAT or ACT scores are the result of cramming or endless test prep that is forgotten once the test is passed?
This is a flagrant misuse of results from a test that is designed to use in combination with high school grades to predict first year grades in college. Beyond the first year, the results have little predictive value. Moreover, the SAT results are more indicative of the students’ family income at the time they applied to college as opposed to their aptitude for, preparation for, and commitment, at the time they complete their degrees, to guiding others to meet educational objectives.
A better way to incentivize teachers to work and stay in high needs school districts is to offer “Tax Free Teaching” after three years. Zero state and federal taxes. Does not cost school districts a dime and does boost pension burdens either.
does NOT boost pension burdens
This would be great for me, except that my county only ranked 5% of it’s teachers as Highly Effective, clearly a problem with the evaluation tool, not the teachers. The county north of us had 45% teachers Highly Effective, obviously something is not kosher.
Your James Bond portrayal was under-rated.