{"id":13321,"date":"2012-09-20T12:39:13","date_gmt":"2012-09-20T16:39:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/?p=13321"},"modified":"2012-10-31T15:39:44","modified_gmt":"2012-10-31T19:39:44","slug":"qa-with-florida-teachers-union-president-andy-ford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2012\/09\/20\/qa-with-florida-teachers-union-president-andy-ford\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&A With Florida Teacher’s Union President Andy Ford"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

NEA Public Relations\/flickr<\/p>

FEA President Andy Ford<\/p><\/div>\n

Gov. Rick Scott\u2019s announcement that education is his priority moving forward got the attention of the Florida Education Association (FEA).<\/p>\n

FEA President Andy Ford had dinner with Scott last week and is talking about why he thinks the governor is now so focused on improving education in Florida.<\/p>\n

Q: <\/span>How did your dinner with Gov. Scott come about?<\/p>\n

A: <\/span>The governor reached out. His chief of staff called and asked for a meeting and wanted to do it Friday at the mansion.<\/p>\n

He wanted a few local leaders with me, so there were a total of six of us from FEA plus the interim commissioner (Education Commissioner Pam Stewart) and Mrs. Scott.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Q: <\/span>What did the Governor\u2019s Mansion serve for dinner?<\/p>\n

A: <\/span>Grouper. It was very good. And he told us a lot about the mansion. We got a little tour. They\u2019ve been going through renovations, and they made sure to continually press upon us that it was all private funding to restore the mansion.<\/p>\n

Q: <\/span>The governor has announced he\u2019s creating a superintendent\u2019s group to try to cut down on all the red tape facing teachers and administrators. Did you have anything to do with that?<\/p>\n

A: <\/span>He had a meeting with the superintendents association, the school boards association, and the PTA at each one of the cities he went to on the listening tour, so it probably came out of that. He didn\u2019t mention that to us, although we did talk about the stresses that teachers were under.<\/p>\n

Q: <\/span>He told reporters this week that education is now his priority. He\u2019s looking at it from the standpoint that you need a strong education system to boost job creation. What do you make of this turnaround by the governor to put education first?<\/p>\n

A: <\/span>If we\u2019re going to have movement away from a tourist and minimum wage job market, you\u2019re going have to have high quality schools, and I think he sees that.<\/p>\n

What we went through last spring with the school grades, the school cut scores on the FCAT writing and things like that, and the frustration that parents voiced — I think that\u2019s probably what captured his attention.<\/p>\n

We did spend a lot of time talking about testing, teacher evaluations and how some of the laws that have been passed just don\u2019t make sense when you try to lay it onto a calendar that matches the school year. And he did seem genuinely concerned.<\/p>\n

Q: <\/span>What else did you talk about at the dinner?<\/p>\n

A: <\/span>We talked about funding and the fact that things have been eliminated. He stressed that he went to public schools and having grown up poor \u2013 very poor \u2013 that he wouldn\u2019t have had the ability to be where he is today if it weren\u2019t for good public schools and caring teachers.<\/p>\n

Q: <\/span>Where do you and Gov. Scott continue to differ on the issues?<\/p>\n

A: <\/span>Well, I think you\u2019re not changing the world in one dinner. But unless you sit down and start talking, you have no chance of changing the world.<\/p>\n

Public schools are the key to the success of kids, but also the success of the governor.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t be successful and create jobs if you don\u2019t really have an investment in public schools, and it has to be traditional public schools. He did say he believes in choice, and it\u2019s just how you define that choice that we have to work on.<\/p>\n

Q: <\/span>In your discussion regarding choice and traditional schools, does that mean you don\u2019t want any money going to charter schools?<\/p>\n

A: <\/span>There are two types of charters: \u00a0the corporate charters and what I refer to as the Mom and Pop charters — a group of people get together and they want to do experiments and see if they can teach kids better.<\/p>\n

It may be a group of teachers within a school that want to do that, or it could be teachers with parents that want to do that.<\/p>\n

Our difficulty comes in when it\u2019s a corporation that\u2019s coming in and is going to make a profit off of educating children. They do that in a variety of ways\u2026which is just a use of taxpayer dollars to be diverted into a business enterprise.<\/p>\n

If Amendment 8 passes, it\u2019s sending money without the accountability system that the traditional public schools have.<\/p>\n

These schools would not necessarily give the FCAT. We would not know how their students are scoring; whether they really are teaching the courses that they\u2019re supposed to be teaching and whether their teachers are certified or not.<\/p>\n

All those things do play into how you go about trying to make profit off of teaching kids.<\/p>\n

Q: <\/span>Have you seen the movie \u201cWon\u2019t Back Down?\u201d<\/p>\n

A: <\/span>No, but I\u2019ve seen the commercials for the movie. I think one thing that people need to remember and what the supporters of vouchers and charters are not going to tell people is that it\u2019s fiction.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know a teacher that wouldn\u2019t agree with the fact that they want to fight for kids, and this movie from what I understand and what I\u2019ve read about it tries to portray teachers in the worst possible light.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s fiction, and it\u2019s taking things to the extreme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gov. Rick Scott\u2019s announcement that education is his priority moving forward got the attention of the Florida Education Association (FEA). FEA President Andy Ford had dinner with Scott last week and is talking about why he thinks the governor is now so focused on improving education in Florida. Q: How did your dinner with Gov. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":13324,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18],"tags":[1184,699,753,1009,672,1109,1027],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13321"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13321"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13339,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13321\/revisions\/13339"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}