FEA: Florida must stop chasing away good teachers

For a parent, it’s a basic question: Is a professional, well-prepared teacher working with my kids? Increasingly, the answer may be no in Florida’s public schools.

Headlines this summer have made clear that we have a shortage of teachers. The

found nearly 70 teaching jobs posted for the Lake, Orange and Seminole districts at the start of school. As of Aug. 28, Lake County still was seeking 11 teachers for one elementary school.

The shortage is getting worse. The Florida Education Association counted 2,400 advertised vacancies statewide at the start of August 2016. This year, the number rose to 4,063. That means more than 250,000 students potentially started school without a regular teacher in one or all classes.

That’s a problem our state needs to fix. Our students need trained, effective teachers in their classrooms.

Why is Florida short on teachers? Some reasons are as obvious as elephants in a neighborhood yard — low pay (ranked 45th in the nation) and a lack of respect for the profession. Other, less-obvious factors are down in the weeds of state policy.

The big picture, however, is clear: Our state’s system for getting and keeping teachers is broken.

Due to policy decisions, we are driving away experienced, effective teachers in favor of new recruits who have spent little or no time in a classroom. Many of these recruits won’t stay — 40 percent of beginning teachers in Florida leave the profession in their first five years. Failing at teacher retention, we end up with shortages, constant churn and too many substitutes in front of students.

Add to that a drop in candidates formally entering the profession, with a reported 23 percent decline nationwide in the number of people completing teacher-preparation programs from 2007-08 to 2015-16.

With too few candidates coming from traditional programs, Florida and most other states offer non-education college graduates an alternative path into classrooms. Florida requires less than most states, and all an applicant need do is pass a subject area test to earn a temporary certificate. New teachers have three years to complete the steps to full licensure.

Many quit before finishing the requirements. Others want to stay but trip up on the “general knowledge” test they must pass within their first year. Our system bounces those teachers back out of the profession, no matter how highly rated by their principals they are or how effective they are with students. They typically are replaced by green recruits.

Down in the policy weeds, Florida’s system for getting and keeping teachers appears to have two important chokepoints, where changes could help keep good teachers: the Florida Teacher Certification Examinations and “VAM” teacher evaluation. The Florida Education Association strongly supports high standards for teachers, but we suspect something has gone awry with the FTCE general knowledge test that all teachers must pass for certification.

The requirements for passing the test were changed in 2015, and passing rates have since plummeted in all four areas tested (essay, English language skills, reading and mathematics). More teachers rated as effective or highly effective have not been able to pass and are not allowed to keep teaching — in a state that desperately needs them.

If proven teachers are losing their jobs because of the test, the FEA has to ask: Do the new requirements reflect the current demands of a beginning classroom teacher? The Florida Department of Education needs to assess the situation and see if we can keep more good teachers in front of students.

In evaluation, Florida uses “valueadded models,” which are complicated formulas intended to measure the “value” a teacher adds to student learning. The use of the models has been panned by many respected organizations, including the American Statistical Association and the American Educational Research Association. Experts say the formulas lack the reliability and validity to be a fair way to evaluate anybody. Here in Florida, these algorithms can break a teacher’s career.

The FEA supports high standards for teachers, as well as meaningful, fair evaluation. There are good alternatives to VAM for assessing how well teachers help students learn.

If Florida wants to get and keep more good teachers, it will have to tackle the elephants such as low pay. But it also needs to dive into the weeds and fix its system, moving away from a reliance on questionable evaluation methods and stop-gap measures for filling vacancies.

Our students need teachers. Let’s stop chasing them away.