Teachers will “Take on Tallahassee” for more respect, boost to school funding | Opinion

The teacher rebellion is coming to Florida.

We’ve seen it in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky. Just a few weeks ago, thousands of teachers took over Indianapolis — because, “The stakes were too high to stay home.”

Now it’s Florida’s turn. On Jan. 13, thousands of students, parents, teachers and allies will “Take on Tallahassee.” We’ll join together at the statehouse to demand better funding for public schools and a brighter future for the state’s young people.

This likely will be the largest rally Tallahassee will see in 2020 — we can feel it, because our statewide union, the Florida Education Association, already is taking action. In October and November, our Fund our Future bus tour visited 50 communities in 31 counties, including Miami-Dade, Broward and Monroe.

From the Keys to the Panhandle, Floridians are fed up with empty rhetoric that leads to empty or inadequate classrooms. We’re facing a severe statewide teacher shortage, generating embarrassing headlines such as, “Teachers quit in Florida, citing ‘toxic’ conditions and a ‘testing nightmare,’” in the Washington Post.

Is life really that bad for Florida teachers? Paula Dockery a veteran GOP legislator, who was on the Chamber of Commerce Honor Roll during her years in the Florida House and Senate reports that there’s nothing honorable about the way her former colleagues treat teachers:

“The Legislature is continually attacking them and making them feel unappreciated and disrespected. They’re forcing high-stakes testing on them and judging them and their schools on factors beyond their control. They’re micromanaging how and what they teach. They’re diverting much-needed funds from traditional public schools to private schools and for-profit charter schools.”

On top of constant interference in classrooms, Florida is at the bottom of the heap for teacher pay. Despite our trillion-dollar economy, we’re 46th in the nation — fourth from the bottom — in average teacher salary.

The predictable result: Florida educators are leaving the profession. Almost 40 percent of young teachers in the state are quitting after less than five years, and the pipeline for new teachers is drying up. Between 2014 and 2018, there was a 20 percent drop in Florida college students earning bachelor’s degrees in education.

These terrible trends translate into more than 3,500 unfilled teaching positions during the current school year. Right now, upwards of 300,000 Florida students — more than 10 percent of our entire K-12 population — are being taught by substitutes or by teachers unqualified in their subject areas. Or in some cases, by no one at all.

Paul Cottle, a Florida State University physics professor, explained how the teacher shortage affects students, especially in math and science. In Florida, 36 high schools with 1,000 students or more fail to offer physics classes because they can’t find certified teachers, and an uncertified teacher now teaches one out of eight English classes.

Is this really the best Florida can offer?

As veteran teachers, it pains us to see colleagues leave jobs they love and students cheated out of a quality education. That’s why we’ll be in Tallahassee next week. We won’t sit still and watch young people sacrifice their dreams because of neglect and mismanagement by adults. We’ll challenge the legislature to secure long-term funding for public schools and to stop pointless, high-stakes testing.

We’re also calling for better pay for teachers — across the board, not bonus plans as Gov. DeSantis has proposed. Bonuses might work for CEOs with large base salaries, but not educators trying to pay rent while living on tight budgets. Florida students deserve better than to have one of the lowest-paid education workforces in the nation at work in their classrooms.

We are rebels with a cause — join us.

Fed Ingram, a former Teacher of the Year in Miami Dade County Public Schools, is president of the 140,000-member Florida Education Association

This story was originally published January 10, 2020 at 11:49 PM.