The Florida Education Association is suing to block the implementation of a program that gives $10,000 bonuses to teachers with high SAT or ACT scores (taken in high school), but denies the bonuses to regular teachers unless they can not only produce their high school scores (20 years ago? 30 years ago?) but are rated “highly effective.” At the time the bill was passed, even some Republican legislators called it “the worst bill of the year.” It never had a hearing in the Senate. Its author wrote the bill after he read Amanda Ripley’s “The Smartest Kids in the World.”
December 21, 2015 Contact: Mark Pudlow 850.201.3223 or 850.508.9756
FEA files discrimination charges against
Best and Brightest teacher bonus program
The Florida Education Association (FEA) filed age and race discrimination charges today against the Florida Department of Education and the state’s school districts over implementation of the controversial Best and Brightest bonus program that was slipped into the state budget at the close of June’s special session of the Florida Legislature. FEA filed the charges with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Florida Commission on Human Relations.
“Too many high-quality teachers in Florida were denied access to this bonus program because of the unfair and discriminatory rules and short timeline set up by lawmakers,” said FEA President Joanne McCall. “This bonus plan wasn’t thought out very well and wasn’t properly vetted in the Legislature and that has resulted in many good teachers unfairly denied access to this bonus.”
In the complaint, FEA notes that the Legislature appropriated more than $44 million for salary bonuses of a maximum of $10,000 each to teachers who received an evaluation of “highly effective” and who scored in the 80th percentile or above on their college admission test, either the SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test) or the ACT (American College Testing). The law exempts all first-year teachers from the “highly effective” requirement.
The complaint says this bonus program discriminates against teachers who are older than 40 and minority teachers, providing these reasons:
· Because no percentile data is available from ACT or SAT for teachers who took these tests before 1972, such teachers are disqualified from receiving the bonus.
· The October 1 deadline for submitting applications for the bonus further discriminates against teachers older than 40 years old, because a disproportionate number of them took the ACT and SAT many years ago and were unable to get access to their scores from the testing programs before the deadline.
· The exemption of first-year teachers from the requirement that they provide evidence of being rated “highly effective” under the respondent employers’ performance evaluation system further discriminates against and has a disparate impact on teachers older than 40 years old. First-year teachers are overwhelmingly younger than 40 years of age.
· The bonus program also discriminates against African-American and Hispanic teachers by using the SAT and ACT as qualifiers. It has been well-established in the courts and peer-reviewed scholarship that the SAT and ACT are a racially and culturally biased tests that disparately impact test-takers on the basis of African-American and Hispanic race.
The complaint also notes that the SAT and ACT were not designed for measuring teacher performance, for use in granting salary bonuses, or for any other aspect of the Best and Brightest bonus program.
FEA is seeking to make sure all qualified teachers are able to get access to the bonus money if they are qualified.
The Florida Education Association is the state’s largest association of professional employees, with more than 140,000 members. FEA represents pre K-12 teachers, higher education faculty, educational staff professionals, students at our colleges and universities preparing to become teachers and retired education employees.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Here’s Arne Duncan with the same message citing the same author:
“There’s a new book out called “The Smartest Kids in the World, and How They Got That Way.” The author, Amanda Ripley, found an interesting way to compare American schools with those in top-performing countries. She spent time with American students who did a year of school abroad, and with students from other countries who went to school in the United States.
One of the countries she compares us to is South Korea.
In the United States, a significant proportion of new teachers come from the bottom third of their college class, and most new teachers say their training didn’t prepare them for the realities of the classroom. So underprepared teachers enter our children’s classrooms every year, and low-income and minority kids get far more than their share of ineffective teachers.
In contrast, in South Korea, elementary teachers are selected from the top 5 percent of their high school cohort. Teachers there get six months of training after they start their jobs. They are paid well, and the best receive bonus pay and designation as “master teachers.”
It’s never just one state legislator. These ed reform “ideas” come from the top and then the “market based” ranks at the state level swallow whatever the national people come up with, whole. One can nearly always trace state legislation to the lobbyists and politicians in the national “movement”.
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Legislation like this is easily fashioned into a signing bonus for TFAers in Florida. Most of the money will be spent on a high school achievement not predictive of evne the coveted, corporate-reform, erroneously-test-score-based “highly effective.”
When I read nonsense like this, I envision it being celebrated by braying beasts of burden.
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Younger middle class workers should be really wary of politicians/lobbyists who push bonuses rather than wage increases:
“While a few more dollars in each paycheck may lack that Christmas-morning feeling, a raise is the gift that keeps on giving. The benefits of wage increases are compounded each year, with every future raise building on the back of the one before it. In addition, salaries are the foundation of a range of other benefits, like Social Security and pensions.”
Compensation based on bonuses rather than wage increases are one of the reasons the middle class is disappearing. Middle class people need slow growth over time- they can’t rely on the equivalent of winning the lottery.
Politicians are giving young people really bad financial advice when they push these systems.
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DUMB and a version of Bill Gates/NCTQ/TFA thinking about the value of the SAT or comparable measure as a predictor of great SUPER GREAT teaching.
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The Florida governor has a line item veto. He vetoed over $460 MILLION in the 2015 budget. Although the “Best and Brightest” met NONE of his proclaimed criteria, he let it stand. $40 MILLION for a TFA scholarship fund! Governor Scott is the Sith Lord.
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So this is what the definition of an effective teacher has been reduced to: a snapshot in time of your SAT score. A high test score does not make one a great teacher. The SAT does not measure empathy and compassion. I would be curious to see the SAT scores of sociopathic CEO’s/Vulture Capitalists. Under the criteria enabled by Florida politicians, one of them could easily be teaching our most vulnerable children, after spending five weeks at a TFA camp. Ugh ……
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I have been teaching for over 20 years. In all of my years the “best” teachers have been those who were not ivy league alumni. In fact, the first teachers to quit or leave the profession altogether tend to be those from the ivy league schools. They can always fall back on their undergrad degrees from esteemed schools to get a higher paying job.
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