Then what do these teachers have to worry about?
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Suppose the Board assigns you to a school where you are trying to teach English composition to a class composed of recently arrived Haitians who can barely read Creole. Every semester, 10 of the 30 students in your class are replaced by more Haitians, as students drop out and transfer. So your class shows zero improvement from one year to the next, and the legislature gives you no raise at all, despite a 10% rise in the cost of living. You have a MA degree, and the state will not pay extra for you to take any more classes. So what do you do?
You move to another state or another part of the state where you have some chance of keeping up with the cost of living, of course.
In Florida, there is no permanent certification: you can have a PhD in your major field and an MA in Education, and the state STILL requires you to take three semester hours per year to retain your certificate. The courses that teachers take tend to be rather easy things, taught at bargain rates by other teachers in the system hired as adjuncts by the various state and private colleges. Or they are irrelevant courses, that could not help teachers do much of anything other than teach them how to teach the same irrelevant course.
I enrolled in a program to be a computer ed specialist at Barry University, and took a course in Pascal, taught by a teacher who was unable to actually complete her own simple assignments. By simple, I do not mean that they were easy to do, but that they did nothing useful. The software used in the compiler part of the program was capable of generating 100 errors due to a misplaced semicolon, with no indication as to the cause of the error.
She was lucky that there was always one student who seemed to know how to do these. Of course, no one uses Pascal for writing educational software, not were there any courses taught that used Pascal for any purpose. They decided to require it for the Specialist's degree simply because the head of the Dept. had taken it way back in the days of hulking mainframes of 8-bit computers. I dropped out of the program when I realized that only the public schools would recognize this degree as useful for anything, and I had had enough of the public system.
There are problems with the system, but the stupid Republican Bill would solve none of them. Mostly, it would allow the legislature to give raises to only a small number of teachers and to screw the majority.
According to a poll in the Herald, 76% want Crist to run for the Senate as an independent.
