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My final speech to the HCPS school board

This will be the final post of the Teacher Voice blog and podcast project that I began in the middle of 2017. I started speaking at school board meetings in Hillsborough County and elsewhere around the state the year before in an effort to educate the public about the looming crisis in public education. I have no doubt in my mind that my education advocacy also led to me walking away from the profession, because all of the research only made me sad and angry.

Plus, if we’re being completely candid with one another–regardless of lack of investment in our students and their educators–the entire system is backwards and broken, pointing toward a past we left behind long ago…

My Students

You are all that ever mattered to me. Many, many times over the years of my teaching tenure, people told me to quit. Said I was too smart. Wasting my time. Could be making more money. None of that mattered to me because I loved being around the kids. I never meant to be a teacher. I don’t have a degree in education. I’m just a lifelong learner / nerdy guy who loves to share what he’s learned. And what did I learn the most that I passed along to all of you, my students? Probably what I wrote here, one of my favorite posts over the years. In essence: everyone wants to be seen, heard, recognized, encouraged and loved. I did my best to make sure you felt those things during our time together. If I failed you in this capacity, I am genuinely sorry…but know that I tried my best every day to instill and nurture a similar constant curiosity and love of learning in each of you.

My Colleagues

No matter how long we worked together, I appreciate you and your impact on my own progression in the profession. When I started back in 2004 I had many wonderful mentors and years later many have become lifelong friends. By the time I was walking away I felt as if I had become the mentor to many in turn, and so at least I feel as if I paid it forward in the 17 years I was with HCPS. It is unfortunate that I had to leave you behind, but for my own sanity it had to be done. Know that I think of you and all educators every day, and I salute those of you who carry on in the face of great adversity.

Having said that, though, I am dead serious when I encourage any educator who saw that video or reads these words to QUIT. It was bad enough when the state continued to undermine public education by not investing any money into it, but then COVID happened and the money printer went into high gear, touching off record inflation that remains sticky and unlikely to ever revert to the mean. At the same time, veteran teachers who have toiled away for a decade or more barely make $50K and new teachers walking through the door have a guarantee of $45K.

Between the lack of meaningful raises and rampant inflation, pitiful teacher salaries have been decimated.

Nothing shows how little the state/your district cares about the veteran teachers who have knowledge and experience than this cockamamie scheme that has been the killer blow to our profession. This is exactly what the state wants: a burn-and-churn workforce that comes in all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to change the world out of some noble yet naive passion. These young teachers quickly realize the work is endless, they have no support or resources, and eventually leave for something that is far easier, more lucrative, and carries zero emotional baggage–all before they are vested in FRS.

The Parents

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but many kids are absolutely out of control in the classrooms, even at the best schools. There are not enough adults to properly supervise kids, and the explosion of smartphone usage and how it has become normalized by our society means most kids are already tuned out by the time they get to school. We have parents worried about a single book in a library that is probably collecting dust, meanwhile kids are all trying to do the latest TikTok dance with their friends or exchanging highly explicit content with them via random airdrops, text messages and/or DMs on social media apps. And even if kids are caught in the act of doing something wrong or bad, it’s often brushed under the rug or if there is any consequence it is minimal at best. Students routinely cuss out each other and teachers openly, and there is never any repercussion. Due to the influence of social media (again, not books), many students are shockingly sexually active at a very young age (talking 6th grade here…and in affluent neighborhoods where moms would be clutching pearls if they knew). Unless you are absolutely sure this is not one of your own children, it would be worth sitting him / her / them down to have a long, honest discussion about their friends, social media use, and what it is like in their classrooms at school.

The Public

I cannot convey with words how difficult this job is, nor how much more difficult it has become in the last 5 years or so. Unless you have lived it yourself, it is hard to understand how badly our profession is treated. In short, we have an education system that is administered by politicians with an agenda, not educators who know what’s best for children. For instance, we have a governor who is walking contradiction. He wants freedom in all things provided it’s his version of freedom. You can go down an entire list of absurdities, from him telling people they should be free to not wear masks, only to blast high school students when they exercised their freedom of choice to wear a mask. Or how about how he’s constantly attacking higher education for indoctrination and being run by so-called “elites” yet this is coming from the mouth of a guy who graduated from Yale and Harvard Law. Or when he’s carrying on about how parents’ rights are fundamental when it comes to the decisions they make for their children/students but gets riled up when parents don’t do what he thinks is the right thing. The craziest thing to me is this crusade against books. If DeSantis knew anything about child psychology, he’d be taking a list of all the books he wants them to not read and explicitly endorse reading them, because then no tween or teen would want anything to do with them. Again, what happened to “freedom”? How can any educator feel safe to discuss ideas or have an exchange of views via dialogue in a classroom? Can parents not monitor the child if he or she is reading one of these banned books? Most of us read them or discussed the ideas contained therein and we all turned out fine.

Then you also have all the corporate welfare and crony capitalism like I reference above in the video. When the Commissioner of Education is getting a six figure salary from the largest for-profit charter operator in the state, is anyone really surprised by all these voucher laws that just divert funds to pad the bottom line of these charter schools which offer the same exact crap as the public schools anyhow? Corcoran and Diaz alone have been scamming the public for a decade…

The entire education system is irreparably broken if we’re all being honest. It is a commodified, monetized race to the bottom in which the biggest losers will be the poorest students. They will continue to attend the last remaining public schools because all we’re really doing is warehousing children so that parents can go to work. And then they will simply be lost because of how impossible it will be for them to climb out of the socio-economic downward spiral.

And this doesn’t even address the fact that virtually all of what we are doing in education is not helping students get ready for the 21st century. Something that I first wrote about over four years ago here, and discussed openly in front of the school board several times.

My Final Plea

So why should you quit if you are a Florida teacher? It’s simple. You have virtually unlimited upside. The state has divested so heavily from education and made it so miserable to teach that the shortage has become extreme. Why is this important? It gives you the freedom to take risks, especially economically, because you know you can always come back to teaching as a last resort. There are tons of opportunities out there, many of which will rely on the same suite of soft skills that you have developed during your time in the classroom. Whether it’s project management, technical writing, corporate training, or virtually any number of options you could pursue, there are jobs out there that will pay you much better, treat you with respect as a professional hired to do a job (not micromanaged into oblivion by stressed out administration), and allow you to work only when you are scheduled to do so.

And all without the tremendous emotional baggage that comes with teaching.

Will you miss it? Yes. Probably every day. I know I do. I will forever cherish the moments I spent creating magic between the bells. The kids carried me through nearly 20 years. But I couldn’t put up with the utter lack of respect from people who have no clue what it’s like to be a teacher in general, let alone stay a teacher in this forsaken wasteland of public ed that is the Sunshine State.

So I said it several times in my final speech, and I may as well say it one final time…

QUIT!

I will be leaving the blog and its contents (as well as the Facebook page) up until late May when I will no longer renew the lease on the site. Like all things, it will fall into the sands of time and I will be completely done with using my time and energy on education. I hope that our paths cross in other avenues of life, but this chapter will forever close soon enough.

Much love to you and yours,

Ryan

Yes, it feels this great when you’ve walked away for good

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Loma
Florida teachers just took another one on the chin from the Florida Legislature

Remember the tail end of last year when Rep. Chris Latvala, the chair of the House PreK-12 Appropriations committee, went on record stating, “I don’t anticipate the type of bills that will dramatically change the education system, as we’ve done the past few years”?

He couldn’t have been more dead wrong.

SB7070, introduced just days after session began, sailed through the process and was recently touted as a crowning legislative achievement by Governor Ron DeSantis‘ office. Setting aside the fuzzy math being used by our legislators that was recently covered in the Florida Phoenix, the legislation wrought numerous changes that only minority special interests and lobbyists wanted to see pass.

Whether it’s arming teachers, using the public’s money to provide private school vouchers to religious schools, subverting the will of local voters, or just flat out ignoring the wishes of Florida’s majority, the Florida Legislature did what it does best–pass legislation no one wants or is asking for.

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YAY! We finally passed completely unconstitutional legislation to ensure that convicts and crackheads can teach kids about how dinosaurs were our pets 5000 years ago!

Instead, teachers all across Florida got a legislative session that will only exacerbate the current teacher shortage and make everything much worse for the tens of thousands of educators all across the state, let alone the millions of students who will be impacted by these disastrous decisions.

Despite the return of phrases such as “historic funding increases” in the news and on the DeSantis press release, the truth is that even with this new FEFP total that is close to $7700, it would still be nearly $1000 shy of an inflation adjusted $7126 per-pupil amount from more than a decade ago, something that has been discussed at length here and elsewhere.

But guess what? Costs have risen and the increases will barely cover expenses.

There’s a reason why 20 out of 20 counties/school districts across Florida voted to tax themselves to cover the financial shortfalls from Tallahassee, and it’s precisely because these citizens realize the value of our public schools and the funding they require to keep up with routine maintenance, technology upgrades, or salary enhancements to local teachers and ESPs. And how does the Florida Legislature react? By trying to co-opt the windfall and force districts to share the funds with charter schools, many of whom are for-profit managed and will simply siphon off much of that money to their bottom lines.

Meanwhile–and as if the Florida Legislature hasn’t done enough to tilt the playing field already–an issue that has largely flown under the radar is that for the last several years the Florida Legislature has continued to give more and more of the PECO dollars to the charters, even after already forcing the districts to share revenue with a provision in HB7069 two years ago. Back then, traditional schools received $50 million, and charters received $50 million. And while that may seem equitable, it’s a lot less money when we consider the fact that there are over 3600 traditional public schools and just over 600 charters statewide. Last year, they gave traditional schools $50 million, and provided charters with just over $140 million, even though they have schools that are only 5-6 years old on average. This year? Well they just went ahead and gave them all of the PECO dollars, a cool $158 million.

So guess where cost overruns outside of categorical spending will come from? The BSA, or Base Student Allocation. But while everyone is cheering the $75 increase–which amounts to a 15,857% increase over last year’s 47 cents, a number I’m honestly surprised the governor, FLDOE, or legislators haven’t put on billboards yet–many forget that with the increased costs much of this will be eaten up and not go toward salaries. Here in Hillsborough, for instance, that portion of the budget would mean a $16.5 million dollar increase if every single student attended a traditional public school. They don’t, which means the number is smaller. Yet even if it were that number, it costs our district $17 million per year just to ensure step movement on our regular pay scale.

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Oh! Every teacher in Florida needs a sizable raise? Silly us! We thought you asked us to CUT your pay, you know, because you’re making too much already.

And that massive loss of gross earnings that nearly 10,000 teachers were fearing? Yeah, that happened too. Only the Florida Legislature could take a really bad idea and make it SO much worse. Setting aside the faulty premise of the previous Best & Brightest program, there were two beneficial aspects:

1) to some extent, it was within the teacher’s control to be rated highly effective (although many have noted the wide disparities in these ratings across districts throughout the state) and to then either have the scores from years past or–like my wife and I did–simply retake the test to get the requisite scores. Ultimately, it was largely about taking initiative and demonstrating individual excellence;

2) even if the scores were not there, virtually all teachers across the Sunshine State got something. If rated “Effective,” last year teachers would earn $800, and “Highly Effective” received $1200. The proposed House version of the updated program this year would have scrapped the scores and given all E rated teachers around $1100 and all HE rated teachers a bonus of $2300. Unfortunately for all of us, the Senate version was adopted, and that one is chock full of terrible ideas for how to “reward” teachers…

A one-time $4,000 recruitment bonus for new hires who are considered “content-experts” (Yet have never taught?! Sort of like the fresh out of college kids who got $6K because of test scores, right?!).

An “anybody’s guess” bonus attached to cockamamie schemes that are largely beyond the control of any given teacher at a school that now has to move up 3 percentage points over the two previous year’s school grade data (Yeah, good luck getting that…here’s your lottery ticket).

A “recognition” bonus of who knows how much based on the “how-much-of-the-previous-two-categories-did-we-spend-money-on-let’s-use-the-leftovers-for-that” plan. And oh yeah, the principal will decide. Nothing like putting him or her in a bad place or having teachers hating each other because they weren’t chosen.

In the end, this was another lousy legislative session for teachers and students all across Florida, regardless of how legislators try and spin this hot mess. There are several veteran teachers who have personally told me they are walking away after this year is over, and until the Florida Legislature actually starts listening to the people who serve our children on a daily basis things will never get better, and we’ll all be seeing more posts like Jonathan Carroll’s on Facebook.

Thanks for the pay cut, Tallahassee!

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It’s 2019, we’ve got a booming economy, and I’m about to take a 13% pay cut.

According to Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinel, last year just over 9200 teachers in Florida qualified as Best and Brightest Scholars, the teachers who were both rated highly effective and had 80th+ percentile scores on the SAT or ACT. Between the $6,000 for the “scholar” designation and the $1,200 bonus for being highly effective, the net $7,200 represented an increase of over 13% to my base pay of $54,000.

At no point, however, in any of the announcements from either Governor Ron DeSantis or Senator Manny Diaz, has there been any mention of grandfathering in the previous recipients. Instead, it would seem nearly 10,000 teachers working in the Sunshine State–which already ranks 45th nationally in terms of pay–are about to take a substantial pay cut.

To be blunt, these bonus schemes are a horrible way to increase teacher recruitment and retention in the midst of a nationwide teacher shortage, especially considering one never knows how long they will last. But teachers are desperate to earn more money however they can, and that is the primary reason my wife and I leapt at the chance to take the ACT in the fall of 2016 when I returned to the classroom after spending time as a new teacher mentor. We both passed the necessary benchmark and have received the money for the last few years, but now it would seem we might potentially see a loss of $14,400 between the both of us.

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What’s worse, we both feel responsible for encouraging many of our friends and coworkers to take the test, only to know that they too will face devastating pay cuts if the Florida Legislature’s latest version of Best and Brightest does not earmark money for those who have previously earned it. After all, the way HB7069 had written future dates and expanded criteria into the legislation seemed as if these bonuses were here to stay, with many (if not most) of the recipients planning their finances around these dollars coming in perpetuity.

Shame on us all for forgetting that this is Florida.

But let’s be honest, Best and Brightest was never a good idea. There is zero correlation between how well a person teaches and his or her scholastic aptitude. My original SAT scores from when I was 16 never would have qualified me for Best and Brightest, but at 41 when I sat down to take the ACT on that fateful Saturday morning, I was highly motivated to perform my best due to the economic incentive. Did passing the test help me become a better teacher, though? Absolutely not. Beyond the money, the only thing the test gave me was a sense of accomplishment for attaining my personal goal of scoring in the 99th percentile.

Yet here we are again, pitching a new cockamamie version of Best and Brightest program to help 45,000 lucky teachers with even more fickle metrics beyond their control such as a one point uptick in school grades. It seems glaringly obvious that these bonuses are largely concocted to circumvent collective bargaining / local control of funding by individual school districts, as well as to avoid having these dollars calculated into our paltry pensions from FRS. And just to add insult to injury, the state even goes so far as to direct the local districts to pay their portions of the payroll taxes from the lump sum, in effect taxing teachers twice.

The Florida Legislature needs to do much better than this. In the midst of statewide teacher shortage, our elected officials should start by taking all $400 plus million and sharing it with all education professionals who work with students regardless of whether or not they are in the classroom. ESPs, guidance counselors, media center specialists…anyone who has direct contact with kids on a daily basis deserve so much more than what they currently earn, especially when we take into account that Florida ranks 37th in terms of affordability (it’s the 13th most expensive state in which to live). While Senator Rader introduces bills each year to raise the starting teacher salary to $50,000, his idea is routinely ignored by his fellow legislators. Instead, we will probably continue to see more bonuses such as Best and Brightest, and if the Florida Legislature obstinately continues down this road, the least it could do is not penalize previous recipients by significantly cutting their current earnings.

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Frustrated Teacher
The declining mental health of teachers is an often ignored piece of the puzzle when it comes to why so many leave the profession or so few choose to enter the classroom.

The second guest post of 2019 is finally here! This is a brief bio of the author:

Seth Hopkins-Federman’s career as a teacher started as a way to make sure he wasn’t a starving actor. Through the years, he has taught English and Reading at several different levels and has presented at both state and national conferences. He has finally found a way to substitute his love for the stage with a profound and passionate love for the classroom. He is currently working on his doctorate in Education Leadership with the goal of becoming a striving force in education reform or finding a way to successfully pay off all of the student loans.

It’s not like you haven’t seen the meme splashed all over the walls of Facebook:

A parent is eagerly trying his best to get a loved one to school. After the frequent tries he finally exclaims, “but you have to…because you’re a teacher!”

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Jokes aside, the social emotional piece that is missing from our schools lies not only with the students but with the teachers as well. In the past decade, social health services for teachers have seen an increase of 40% intakes since the implementation of Common Core and higher accountability measures related to evaluation. While it hasn’t been confirmed, there are new suggestions in the data that teachers have been more prone to suicidal thoughts than dentists who are regularly thought to be the profession with the highest suicidal thought capacity. In reviewing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it doesn’t take a scientist or psychologist to see something is not being met. The question is why aren’t we talking about it?

In doing my research, I have found that teachers aren’t necessarily leaving the profession for the common reasons we think. In a review of some of the major strikes in the 2000s, most teachers said pay wasn’t the base need. Instead, it was respect and validation. Can this truly be matched with a pay increase? Research suggests it might, but it deals more with the organizational culture and the approach to how problems are dealt with. We all know that the teachers’ lounge is where we go to kivelt (as my grandmother would say) about our students. But the conversations go from kivelting to beotching (as my second graders in Brooklyn would call it). The conversation doesn’t move to productive solutions just constant complaining. So who’s to blame? Or better yet: why do we need to blame?

It education is going to continuously fall into the cycle of broken bones mended by Band-aids, we have to recognize that our Band-aids are blame accusations and not proactive solutions. Districts need to recognize that class sizes are marring actual learning, school leaders need to be transparent about the way school discipline works, and teachers need to learn more about deescalating than aggravating. This all comes back to a simple social need that all sides are forgetting: validation. Let’s all validate the obvious: this is a tough time to be in education. The phrase lose-lose is unfortunately becoming way too common place in decisions by any stakeholder. Research suggests that if education is to improve, the blame game needs to stop and validation needs to begin. If we can’t begin that cultural shift, it doesn’t matter the test scores or suspension rates, public education will soon see it’s broken bones evolve into organ failure and, ultimately, death.

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Debra Bellanti, Democratic Candidate for House District 60, along with her husband, Anthony, and their daughter, Josephine.

As we continue the summer of podcasts, this week’s special guest is Debra Bellanti, the Democratic candidate for House District 60 of the Florida Legislature. While she is running as a Democrat, Debra is building a bipartisan coalition of mothers who are deeply concerned about the level of funding devoted to public education and how it affects our students’ safety. For these efforts and others, she has received numerous endorsements and distinctions.

In addition to discussing education, Debra also shares her views on several other issues that are critical for the entire Hillsborough delegation in general and her South Tampa community in particular. Please listen and share with other voters of House District 60 or concerned public education advocates!

If you’d like to learn more about Debra, you can check out her website here, like or follow her on Facebook, or follow the conversation on Twitter.

Thanks again for listening, everyone!

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Sue Woltanski, Co-Founder of Accountabaloney and Monroe County School Board Member

This week’s guest on the Teacher Voice podcast is Sue Woltanski, a mother, pediatrician, public education advocate, and now recently elected Monroe County School Board member. We spoke over the phone this past Thursday, one day after the FLDOE released the school grades, which happens to be her area of expertise and what prompted the creation of the Accountabaloney blog. For those of you who are parents and don’t know how school grades are calculated or ever wondered why we have so much testing here in the Sunshine state, this podcast will be particularly insightful.

If you’d like to learn more about Sue and her advocacy efforts, you can also like or follow the Accountabaloney page on Facebook, or follow the conversation on Twitter.

Thanks again for tuning in, everyone, please listen/share with others, and have a great week!

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SafeBusForUs

This week’s Teacher Voice podcast is a full-length interview with Josephine Amato, the director of the Safe Bus For Us parent advocacy group. As last week has shown, safe school bus transportation for children living within two miles has become a contentious issue, especially in light of the traffic jams and challenges for local businesses that the additional cars and student walkers on the road have caused.

Please listen and share with others who are concerned.

***Disclaimer*** After we recorded the podcast, Mrs. Amato realized there were two mistakes in statistics she used: 1) a child is struck walking to school every 3 minutes (not seconds); 2) children who are 13 and over (not under).