Lawmakers: Scale back state rules on teacher merit pay
GOP bills would eliminate more of 2011 law
Florida’s controversial teacher merit-pay law could be scaled back again in coming months, as some state lawmakers think student test scores should no longer play into teacher evaluations.
Proposals filed by two Republican lawmakers would unwind part of what the GOP once touted as one of its landmark reforms of the past decade — the 2011 teacher merit-pay law. The legislation, the first Rick Scott signed as governor, was fiercely opposed by many educators because it did away with some job protections for teachers, tied teacher evaluations to student performance on tests and aimed to end the long-standing practice of giving teachers raises based on years of work.
Laws passed in recent years undid some of those provisions, and now Rep. Rene Plasencia, R-Orlando, wants to go a step further.
His bill (HB 427) would delete from the law a requirement that teachers be judged on the performance of their students, allowing local school boards to adopt
such plans only if they wished. Instead of performance, or merit pay, school districts could once again put all teachers on a pay schedule based on years of experience and give extra money to instructors with advanced academic degrees. The 2011 law also limited extra money only to those whose advanced degrees were directly related to the subject they taught.
Plasencia, who said he’s wanted to reform the law since he was elected in 2014, is not sure House leaders will support the proposal — neither his bill nor its Senate companion have been heard in committee yet — but he remains hopeful. “I feel pretty confident that if I don’t get it done this year, then I will in the next couple of years,” he said.
The 2011 law didn’t lead to better academic performance for students, one of its goals, but it did drive down teacher morale, said the former Orange County teacher who now works in administration for the online Florida Virtual School.
“We don’t think student test scores should be tied to our evaluations,” Plasencia said. “It’s frustrated many teachers, and it’s driven some really good teachers out of the profession, a lot of them early.”
Most teachers would appreciate the changes proposed in the bills, agreed Wendy Doromal, president of the Orange County Classroom Teachers Association.
“The evaluation system is so subjective. You don’t get to pick your students or your class makeup, and you’re being scored on their performance,” she said.
And many are also frustrated they can no longer earn extra pay for a master’s degree and would be pleased if that provision was deleted, Doromal added.
Plasencia filed his bill in October and in late December, Sen. Debbie Mayfield, R-Vero Beach, filed a companion (SB 1324), for the session that starts Tuesday.
She could not be reached for comment. But she is vice chairman of the Senate’s education committee, giving her some say over what legislation might be considered.
Mayfield, then serving in the House, voted for the initial merit-pay law in 2011.
Back then, state leaders touted it as a “game changer” that would boost teacher quality and, in turn, student performance. It created a two-pronged evaluation system, requiring student performance as measured by test scores to be used for half a teacher’s evaluation and a new, more detailed classroom observation system to count for the other half.
But many argue that new system didn’t really change much. Orange educators, for example, last year released a study saying there had not been “significant or stable” improvements in student test scores since the law was adopted.
It also hasn’t changed the bottom line on evaluations. Despite their frustrations with the new system, almost all teachers still get good final reviews, just as they did before the law was passed. In 2016, the most recent year available, nearly 98 percent of Florida’s teachers were evaluated as “effective” or “highly effective,” for example, while about 99 percent earned “satisfactory” evaluations in the year before merit-pay was implemented.
In recent years, the Republican-dominated Legislature has supported other changes to the law that have curtailed its reach. Lawmakers, for example, in 2015 deleted a requirement that schools give students tests at all grades and in all subjects — from kindergarten to high school drama — to provide data for teacher evaluations and reduced the percentage of a teachers evaluation that could be tied to student test-score data .
Last year, they decided student performance on state exams, crunched though a complicated “value-added model” or VAM, no longer had to be used to evaluate some teachers, giving that decision back to local school districts.
The new proposal would do more of the same, Plasencia said.
“It gives school districts more flexibility,” he said. “You’ve got to have more local control.”