{"id":16564,"date":"2013-02-08T14:20:10","date_gmt":"2013-02-08T19:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/?p=16564"},"modified":"2013-02-08T16:19:22","modified_gmt":"2013-02-08T21:19:22","slug":"teachers-question-why-proposed-pay-raises-come-before-teacher-evaluations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2013\/02\/08\/teachers-question-why-proposed-pay-raises-come-before-teacher-evaluations\/","title":{"rendered":"Teachers Question Why Proposed Pay Raises Come Before Teacher Evaluations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Sarah Gonzalez \/ StateImpact Florida<\/p>\n

5th grade teacher Beverley Dowell says she hopes the Governor “isn’t trying to buy teacher votes” when he suggested every full-time teacher in the state get a pay raise before their evaluation results come in.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Most districts won’t start identifying, and potentially removing, low-performing teachers from their schools until next year. But Governor Rick Scott said he wants to give every full-time teacher in the state a pay raise now.<\/span><\/p>\n

“For a while now we’ve been hearing how bad we are,”\u00a0said\u00a0Beverley Dowell, a 5th grade teacher at\u00a0Treasure Island Elementary School in Miami-Dade.\u00a0“[That] we need to weed out bad teachers, there’s so many bad teachers.”<\/p>\n

She says it doesn’t make any sense to give teachers more money before those “bad teachers” have even been identified.<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

“On one hand you’re cleaning us out of the system, on the other hand you’re going to reward us with $2,500 because according to the Governor we truly deserve it,” Dowell said. “We have to be concerned.”<\/p>\n\n

<\/p>\n

Some say the governor is trying to court teachers now as his bid for re-election gets closer.<\/p>\n

In his first year as governor he cut more than a billion dollars in education spending.\u00a0And he’s cut teacher salaries by three percent when he required them to contribute to their retirement pensions.<\/span><\/p>\n

The very first bill he signed into law as governor required all schools to evaluate teacher performance.<\/a><\/p>\n

But Governor Rick Scott now says teachers deserve the raise. He recently went on an education listening tour and says he heard stories of teachers doing a lot with a little.<\/p>\n

“I believe in merit pay<\/a>, I believe in measurement, I believe in accountability, and we’re going to continue to work on that,” Scott said. “But right now, the right thing to do is an across-the-board pay raise all for full-time teachers.”<\/p>\n

The pay raise would cost the state $480 million, but it has to be approved by the legislature first. Even if the legislature approves the pay raise, there’s a chance teachers still won’t see the money.\u00a0Listen to the full story to find out why.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sarah Gonzalez \/ StateImpact Florida 5th grade teacher Beverley Dowell says she hopes the Governor “isn’t trying to buy teacher votes” when he suggested every full-time teacher in the state get a pay raise before their evaluation results come in. Most districts won’t start identifying, and potentially removing, low-performing teachers from their schools until next […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":16608,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[1007,1108,1119,1079],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16564"}],"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\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16564"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16630,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16564\/revisions\/16630"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}