Florida House gives itself a 4% raise instead of a 3% cut in pay.

It would be funny if it weren’t so serious.

Look at the way the Republican-dominated Florida Legislature handles important issues, and it becomes easier to understand the lack of serious thought that has gone into its deeply misguided school reform plans.

The Florida House just passed a $67.2 billion spending bill that was supposed to cut legislator’s salaries by 3 percent. Somehow, the wording of the amendment written by House Majority Leader Adam Hasner of Delray Beach wound up giving them a 4 percent raise. Nobody figured out the mistake before the vote. Now, it is going to have to be resolved in negotiations between the House and Senate.

“It was a mistake,” Hasner was quoted as saying by the Palm Beach Post. “Things happen in this process.”

Such bumbling helps explain the march to pass legislation that teachers rightly see as an assault on their profession and public education.

Yesterday, the Florida Senate voted for Senate Bill 6, which would dramatically change the structure of teacher evaluation, contracts, pay, and licensure in the state. A few amendments were approved on the floor of the senate, but only three appear substantive, and the largest changes happened in committee, in part to address concerns about constitutionality for the initial bill.

As the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss has, most observers have focused on the evaluation, pay, and contract issues, and that's because the intent of the bill is to eliminate any form of tenure, to reorient evaluation around student test scores, and to eliminate the ability of school boards to pay teachers in part based on experience. For a variety of reasons, legislation such as SB 6 is policy overreaching, and as it has in several other ways in the past decade, Florida has gone far beyond any other state in education policy. In part because it is so hostile towards the Florida Education Association, I suspect that some observers will praise the senate even if this turns out to be horrid policy. That way lies Thrasymachus, and it's not pretty.

SB 6 is overreaching. Instead of reducing the protections of tenure, it eliminates all meaningful due process related to job security. Instead of mandating that student outcome data be a part of teacher evaluation, it requires that test scores form the majority of any teacher evaluation system. Instead of moderating the influence of job experience on pay, it completely prohibits any such factor being used.

As a result of this overreaching, school boards are going to be motivated to work with teachers unions on workarounds for most of these issues. For each area where school boards and union locals agree the state has gone too far, they'll figure out another way to provide for some job security, to moderate the effect of test scores on evaluations, or to create a legally defensible proxy for experience in salary structures and call it performance-based pay. It took me about 10 minutes to come up with a few mechanisms for these issues, and I'm not nearly as clever as highly-motivated union officials and superintendents. But as a result, you're going to see highly variable treatment of teachers across the state, which I don't think is the intent of legislators.

There is only one area where the state has an undisputed right to regulate teaching, either in Florida or elsewhere, and that's in licensure. Regardless of what happens in collective bargaining at the local level, any state can decide who has the right to be licensed as a teacher, and at least at first, the part of SB 6 that is least amenable to mediating influences is in the requirement that teachers demonstrate effectiveness to have their professional certifications renewed. Does that mean that it will be tied closely to test scores? That's what I fear.

Dozens of Polk educators lined Edgewood Drive outside state Rep. Kelly Stargel's office this morning to protest the proposed legislation. Armed with signs and wearing red shirts the group chanted, "Don't hurt teachers." Stargel was not at the office at the time of the protest.

..."Marianne Capoziello is the president of Polk's Education Association, which represents teachers in collective bargaining. She said the law basically devalues an educator's service and experience while putting all the emphasis on the success of a standardized test.

"This measure will tell teachers that their advance degrees don't matter, their years of experience don't matter, whether they choose to stay in the classroom doesn't matter, and a single test will determine whether they get pay or how they get paid," Capoziello said.