Cleveland Teachers Union President David Quolke addresses a Cleveland SB-5 repeal watch party.
Based on November’s voter turnout in Ohio, it’s no surprise readers were ready to respond to our story this week that Florida leaders likely won’t initiate a collective bargaining fight in Florida this year (despite past statements to the contrary).
On Facebook, Angela Howard said there’s little advantage to collective bargaining anyway:
I don’t understand why they want to do anything about collective bargaining. Teachers don’t go on strike in FL. It’s not like our local teacher’s union her ever been able to do anything when the county doesn’t live up to what’s in the contract anyway. Districts can decide to give or not give raises and there’s nothing we can do about it. The only benefit I’ve ever gotten is the protection of my 25 minute lunch and my 50 minute planning period.
Governor Rick Scott keeps saying he will veto any budget bill that does not significantly increase funding for Florida public schools. And he’s proposing an extra billion dollars.
But it turns out not all of that money would actually be new money for schools, according to the Governor’s top education policy chief, Scott Kittel.
Here’s the breakdown of the proposed $1.02 billion:
A new Fortune magazine profile says that Gov. Rick Scott wants to rank every Florida school.
Fortune magazine is out with a new profile of Gov. Rick Scott this week that discusses what he’s learned in his first year in office.
The profile hits all the standards marks — Photo of state seal-emblazoned cowboy boots? Check. — but also includes this intriguing detail:
I’m sitting in the governor’s Tallahassee office as Scott quizzes his education chief on a plan to rank the state’s 3,800 schools, first to last. The concept of imposing new metrics is pure Scott and dates, he is explaining, to his Columbia/HCA days, when he would rank, say, emergency rooms, to distill what separated the best from the worst. “Really, if you think about some of this stuff, it’s pretty simplistic,” he says. It’s also exactly the kind of thing that rankles state employees and constituents (“shareholders,” in Scott parlance).
Education Secretary Arne Duncan is one high-profile critic of a teacher salary study from conservative researchers.
Remember that study from two conservative think tanks that argued teachers were overpaid by 50 percent?
The study concluded that taxpayers were “overcharged” by $120 billion each year. That’s the difference between what teachers are paid in salary and benefits and what they would earn in a comparable private sector job.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan rebuked the study, writing in U.S. News and World Report that it “asks the wrong question,” “ignores facts that conflict with its conclusions” and “insults teachers and demeans the profession.”
The study’s authors, Jason Richwine and Andrew C. Biggs, fired back this week in an op-ed published by Education Week:
Is New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott sending a message to charter schools?
New York City’s decision to close a C-rated charter school has sparked a national conversation about what kind of performance should be expected of charter schools.
The school had been previously warned about its performance.
Some observers say the closure of Peninsula Preparatory Charter School is a signal charters need to do more. Is it enough for charter schools to be average, or should they be better than district schools?
Florida’s falling rank on a nation education survey is evidence lawmakers need to increase school funding, state education officials said Thursday morning.
Florida fell to 11th from 5th on the annual “Quality Counts” rankings released by Education Week this morning. Florida was ranked lower in both academic achievement and financing in the survey.
Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, has asked the GOP-controlled Legislature to add $1 billion to the school budget this year.
“We know that our educational system has been strained by the economic downturn,” education commissioner Gerard Robinson said in a statement. “The additional investment in a high-quality education will not show up immediately, but it will be a factor in our success as we move forward.”
The Supreme Court ruled today that religious employees of a church, including private, religious schools cannot sue for employee discrimination, according to the AP.
In the Michigan case, the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School of Redford, Mich., was sued by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of Cheryl Perich, a teacher at the school who sometimes also led chapel service. Perich taught one religious class and four secular classes four days a week.
Perich tried to return to work from disability leave after being diagnosed with narcolepsy in 2004. The school had hired a substitute for that year, and Perich was fired after she threatened to sue for her job back. Perich sought anti-discrimination protection under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The Academy of Arts and Minds in Coconut Grove used to be a shopping mall. But no one was buying space, so the owner of the property founded a charter school and now rents his property to his school. The campus still looks like a shopping mall. There are wrap-around balconies on every floor and the classrooms have floor-to-ceiling windows very much like a store front.
Real estate investment firms have spied a new market in charter schools and are snatching up properties anticipating growth, according to Bloomberg.
Among the industry leaders is a fund founded by former tennis star and charter school advocate Andre Agassi. Perhaps the most interesting nugget from the piece is this: Leasing charter schools property is more lucrative than commercial property:
For Entertainment Properties, the charter-school investment yield is 9 percent to 10 percent, according to Keith Bokota, an analyst at Principal Global Investors. That compares with November’s 7 percent average capitalization rate for commercial- property deals of more than $5 million, according to Real Capital Analytics Inc., a New York-based property research company.
The Canyon-Agassi Charter School’s Facilities Fund appeals to investors seeking a good return on their money while doing something positive for education, said Glenn Pierce, its chief executive officer. Investors in the Los Angeles-based fund — which lists Citigroup Inc., Intel Corp. (INTC), the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the University of Michigan among its backers — can expect yields in the “low teens after fees,” he said.
Teachers and other union members camped out at the Wisconsin state house last year to protest a law stripping collective bargaining rights.
What a difference an election can make.
Last year Legislatures across the country — buoyed by a Tea Party sweep in 2010 elections — challenged teachers and other public employee unions over their ability to collectively bargain pay and other benefits. Florida Gov. Rick Scott wanted to limit collective bargaining in his initial 20-page education plan.
The battle was nationwide news in Wisconsin and later in the year in Ohio, where voters easily overturned a state law stripping collective bargaining rights for public employees.
That fight doesn’t appear to be coming to Florida this year, according to an education expert who previously advocated the legislation.
Patricia Levesque, director of the Foundation for Florida’s Future, said she’s heard no talk of trying to strip collective bargaining rights in the Legislature this year.
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