- THIS WAS A FB POST TOO LONG TO POST, SO HERE IT IS IN MY BLOG...I hear you, I believe from where you stand you do not see the whole picture... just as I did not see the whole picture from where I stood before I was a union leader. The legislature specifically targets teacher unions creating statutes that are unconstitutional and tie our hands at the bargaining table. They make laws about how much our raises can be and how much we have to give the highly effective teachers. They don’t do this to police. They fabricate the idea to use unworthy and meaningless tests to compare us to one another and Pit us against each other and to create a value for what we do in our classroom based on these meaningless tests written and graded by non-educators who make me a lot of money by preparing in selling those tests to the state of Florida as if teaching were a competitive sport with a race horse ..YOU... and YOUR STUDENTS... to the finish! It’s disrespectful, ineffective and simply absurd!Then they tell us to apply VAM, a pseudo mathematical equation, to it that is nothing short of ridiculously erroneous in its very mathematical preposterousness. A voodoo math that cannot possibly bring about a true judgement of anything, especially not for a student test or a series of tests that are meaningless to begin with because the number of variables are impossible to control for that equation, or any other math equation for that matter. It would be like applying a pseudo-mathematical equation to a crime scene in order to rate the effectiveness of a police force. Who in the world would think that that makes sense? No one. But they do it to us and we keep telling the man! So from the beginning they have placed teachers behind the eight ball in ways that they do not place police.They make our contracts annual contracts so we can”t even be certain that we have a career with a future. They do not do this to police and it’s not because their unions are stronger it’s because they do not want to do this to police or firefighters. Not yet anyway! They want to do this to teachers.Because within the education tax coffers of the United States of America is far, far more money to siphon off.. and billionaires know this. Billionaires know that the easiest place to grab money is from the government and they are grabbing our money! Teacher and school and student money. They are grabbing YOUR taxes and playing games!! And they know that we are not going to the voting box to stop them so they just keep on doing it. And how do they know this? Because they look at past elections and they see the numbers of teachers who are voting. Simple. Look at this last election. Our state voted in another Republican who is already siphoning money to charter schools and voucher programs in clearly unconstitutional ways and throwing ridiculous bonuses at us that we cannot even figure out in our paychecks.All over the state the best and brightest bonus has a different amount in every teachers paycheck and all of us are very angry and frustrated and we feel disrespected once again! The fact that we are mostly women doesn’t help. The fact that we only vote in a “important” election, like the last one in numbers ranging around 40% ... and in a minor election 12% to 20% doesn’t help either. They know this about us and they kick us over and over because of it!! The fact that we don’t go out in exhuberently large numbers when we call rally’s doesn’t help! Many are working second jobs and helping the children with homework and cooking dinner and doing the things that women and other heads of households have to do so they cannot attend the Saturday event or an evening event, so they know our crowds will not reach the thousands. I’m not making excuses I’m just telling you the reality of what I see and deal with daily from where I stand.None of it looked this way when I was a classroom teacher and the only way I see what I see now is because I am a union leader, so I know it looks different if you’re not standing in my own shoes and seeing what I’m seeing. What the legislature and the statutes dictate for police and firefighters is very different than what They dictate for teachers. And what They dictate is what each district must follow for their schools. What they dictate via law making and statues (they who have never set foot in the classroom but want to profit by making laws that benefit those who give election donations and the causes they are often unethically invested in) is often wrong and harmful and costs us our respect and causes us to lose faith and morale. If there was a System for testing officers and evaluating them and watching them on the job and going by with a pencil and writing how they do when they do their jobs I guarantee you they would be leaving that profession also and I guarantee you it would be harder for them to do their jobs while being observed as we are observed and evaluated and they would feel very disrespected.That goes for any profession. It’s the laws that are being made by the politicians that are killing us. And the politicians are picked by voters! And the voters can say pay our teachers! . And if every teacher could vote-his or her job and paycheck how far we could go! But that is not always the case because we have other values that we bring into the voting booth with us. This year our union, the Broward teachers union had an 85% voter turn out for our members. That is phenomenal and kudos to President Anna Fusco and the team she inspired... it was an astonishing turn out and we worked extremely hard to get that but that is rare, and what can we do in every county and every city to get a turn out like that, not just from members of unions, but from ALL our teachers and education staff?If you can figure that one out and make it happen across the state, I’m sure we will have the respect that you seek and the money that you seek and I work every day to try to achieve this and it is an uphill battle. It takes thousands of calls and hundreds of volunteers just in our county alone. And even with those efforts as a VP, I still get egg on my face because laws are blocking us, new ones by the day... and I go out with my sword and my shield to fight the dragon and it’s not enough!! Why? Why isn’t it enough?. Union leaders across the country in teacher unions are doing this. But We need thousands of teachers to say it’s enough and to be willing to say it from high places and that is being prevented by many things, not the least of which is annual contracts which helps to silence those with an opinion and an ingenious idea. And it sometimes keeps home those who might be willing to come out and say what needs to be said in the streets and on camera. And I can’t blame or judge them. This Florida legislation shows me they hate teachers and teacher unions in ways they do not target or hate police and those are just the facts. We have our strong defenders in Tallahassee, warriors who fight for us, but they are in the Minority. That’s what has to change.You can research the statutes. New ones are written every day. If you pay attention in Tallahassee as every union leader must, you will see that they are rigging everything against us and some of them are even invested in charter school, testing and privatization. I do not see massive money fueled campaigns by greed corporations going after police to privatize and test them and throw highly effective bogus bonuses at them that teat at the fabric of their profession with the impetus and zeal they do ours! The factors affecting teachers are extremely complex and they are not as simple as “let’s get our union to be as strong as the police union.” Our unions are very strong and very large and that is precisely why they are coming after us! They make laws to shit us down. They do t do that to police.They come after us because our unions are strong and they fear us!! They want to privatize and charterize and voucherize public education so they can pay the education workers less, have un certified teachers in the classrooms supervising children and pretending to be teachers, they want to take away money securities and tenure and professional autonomy and they want to go after our pensions simply because they can. If you read the statutes and you understand how they have been crippling teachers and our unions, the strongest and biggest in the land, systematically so that they can take money from the massive education coffers so that they can open charter schools and invest in testing so the billionaires can get more money... If each voter understood all this they... WE... would know that it is far, far bigger than making a stronger union. Our unions are very strong but what we are up against is the money of billionaires fighting to push down and purposely targeting teachers with the education secretary and all the lawmakers nodding their heads. I wish it were simple, but I’ve found out in the battlefield of daily union work that it isn’t simple at all and it takes ALL of us being outraged, informed and engaged. Let’s do it! I’m ready! So is every union leader I know!Sent from my iPhone
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