Education

Education

            Schools in Florida are failing, but they are not just failing as a school they are failing the kids attending the school and the communities that these children will one day live. There are to many dropouts in today’s school and it has become too easy for a high school student to just decide that they want to quit school.  A lot of the problem can be routed to the teachers unions who claim to have power in numbers and advocate teacher tenure. After further research it can be shown that teachers are no longer receiving tenure here in Florida and soon will be able to make more money based on their performance in the classroom.

            Schools in Florida do not have a very good track record of passing especially here in Duval County. With every state being able to set their own standard for what they consider a passing grade, it’s hard to truly tell what state is actually putting the best graduates. Whatever the standards are that each state is setting, they are clearly not doing the job with our country falling so far behind in the past 20 years. In “Waiting for Superman” we learned that failing neighborhoods are due to failing schools. There are many failing neighborhoods in Jacksonville. Ed White, Ribault, Forrest, and Raines High School all have failing grades.  They all have received bad reviews by parents and former teachers (greatschools.org). However, many of the reviews possibly come from disgruntle parents, teachers, and students. Matter of fact the only school with an overall passing grade in Duval was First Coast High School (schoolgrades.fldoe.org).  All of the other public schools had at least one subject that they were passing in. With the majority of public schools failing, the charter school system seems to be a better route for education with most of them having a higher passing rate (waiting for superman). There are over five hundred charter schools in Florida alone, with one in seventeen students in Florida attending a charter school (stateimpact.npr.org).

            You hear a lot about teachers unions and tenure when the discussion of schools comes up. With 857 students dropping out of school every hour across America, and 6,800 students dropped out of school in northeast Florida alone in 2011 (Jacksonville.com). This makes a good argument as to what really is the problem, the teacher, the student, or possibly the parents in the home allowing the teen to drop out of school. It’s easy to accuse the Unions of not being involved for the right reasons when there total revenue is 30,563,331 (teacher union exposed). It’s also easy to blame the teachers with them receiving tenure in under than 3 years in many states and then being able to keep their job no matter how their students perform. To the contrary, here in Florida it’s quite hard to receive tenure and with the passing of the Senate Bill 736 as of July 1, 2011 teachers will now be evaluated on their performance. They will be rated from highly effective to unsatisfactory, with unsatisfactory in two out of three years resulting in termination of the teacher. In this rating system 50% of the teachers rating will be on student performance and will be hired on a annual basis (stateimpact.npr.org). As of now many teachers don’t have tenure, a teacher at west Nassau High told me she has not received tenure in the past 7 years of service even with high performance marks, and the only teachers with tenure at her school have been with the department longer than 15 years (Feazel). A good fact to note is that more student graduating in Duval schools are college ready in comparison to other counties around Florida. This may be in part to the harder curriculum that was implemented in 2007. Even with more students graduating college ready 60% of students that enroll in Florida State College of Jacksonville are in need of remedial classes (Jacksonville.com).

            With schools having a failing record here in our own community it is plan and obvious that something needs to be done to fix our school system. The local government has noticed the problem and is taking action in the form of laws and bills to make our teachers more accountable and efficient. The parents of a lot of these failing students also need to be healed accountable as well. With violence in schools and kids dropping out without consequences a lot of responsibility lies with the parents of the child offenders. Sharing the blame is the teachers whom have become lazy with tenure and guaranteed work, and need to be held accountable as well. Finally the unions who were once a great idea in the reform of teachers contracts and pay have now out lived there usefulness and are no longer needed.