Teachers who want bonus to take SAT with the students
Chris McKnight, a veteran teacher in Boca Raton, will sit among a row of desks today in a tense classroom of teenagers, taking the SAT just like them.
The stakes will be high for everyone: Students’ scores determine where they will go to college and can affect how much in scholarships they get. But the teens can take the test several times; McKnight has just one shot, this year at least.
He needs to score in the top 20 percent to qualify for a $6,000 annual bonus from the state. He fell short of that score when he last took the SAT, 32 years ago, as a junior at
Clearwater Central Catholic School.
“I’m more nervous than when I took it the first time because I have a lot riding on it,” said McKnight, 49, who has taught English at Olympic Heights High School since 1994. “I haven’t taken a math class since 1992. I’ve had to relearn geometry, algebra, trigonometric expressions. I had to learn to use a graphing calculator.”
A hotly debated 2015 state law tied teacher bonuses to their scores on college entrance exams. Many teachers took the SAT or ACT decades ago and argued that their teaching abilities have no connection to their score on these standardized tests.
The Legislature approved the bonuses, known as the Florida Best and Brightest Teacher Scholarship Program, as a way to encourage the smartest college graduates to choose teaching as a profession and stay in it. The teachers maintain the annual bonus as long as their evaluations grade them as “highly effective.” New teachers can get the awards in their first year but must get the highly effective rating during their first evaluation that year.
Almost 7,200 teachers in Florida applied for and got the bonuses last year. For this year’s awards, teachers have to apply by Nov. 1; Saturday is the last time they can take the SAT in time for the deadline.
It’s not clear how many teachers are retaking the exam. The College Board, which administers the SAT, does not track how many teachers try to qualify for the Best and the Brightest or even how many takers are older than the traditional student.
But the number of teachers getting the award each year, either from retaking the test or their old high school scores, has been growing, at least in most counties. Of the state’s 172,000 teachers, the 7,200 who qualified last year is up from about 5,200 the previous year.
In Palm Beach County, 495 teachers qualified last year, up from 274 the previous year. In Broward, 198 qualified, up from 96 the previous year. In MiamiDade, the number that made the cut fell, from 257 in 2016 to 237.
The size of the award has been going down each year as the number of teachers receiving it grows. It was $8,200 in 2016; last year it totaled $6,800. This year’s total is set at $6,000.
Teacher Justin Katz retook the SAT two years ago, shortly after the awards were first announced. He said his original SAT scores, from 2001, did not place him in the top 20 percent.
At the time he retook the test, he was a teacher at Park Vista High School west of Boynton Beach, and did not want to take the exam among his own students. He chose a Boca Raton site.
“It couldn’t be more degrading, to sit with kids who were going to be in my class next year,” said Katz, 33, who is now president of Palm Beach County’s Classroom Teachers Association.
Katz said he opposes the idea of the bonuses because teachers should be able to earn higher salaries as part of their benefits packages instead of through occasional legislative awards.
“But I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to earn that substantial amount of money,” Katz said. “Of all the ways the Legislature could help teachers earn more money, it would take some effort to come up with a more ridiculous way than this.”