Florida Gov. Rick Scott delivered the State of the State Address to the Legislature on the opening day of its session Tuesday, stressing jobs and education. Here are his remarks on education, as prepared for delivery:

Our work to cut spending and live within our means over the last two years has allowed us to once again invest in education.

The workers of tomorrow are in Florida classrooms today.

When I first stood before you in 2011, I said, “The single most important factor in student learning is the quality of teaching.”

Since that time, we eliminated teacher tenure. We signed performance pay into law, and it will take effect in 2014.

Florida’s education system is making tremendous progress, due in large part to our great teachers and the work begun by Governor Bush and many in this legislature.

Our students and teachers were recently ranked sixth for educational quality; and our fourth-graders scored among the highest in the world on a recent reading evaluation.

Accountability is working.

The best way we can build on this progress is to reward our hard-working teachers with a $2,500 pay raise.

Some say they are afraid that giving raises to all teachers may mean that a teacher doing a bad job gets rewarded. But, thanks to our work, we are now in a better position than ever before to reward good teachers and move bad teachers out of the classroom.

We don’t want a war on teachers; we want a war on failure. (more…)

The mom on stage described how she and other low-income parents rode a bus through the darkness - six hours, L.A. to Sacramento, kids still in pajamas - to plead their case to power. In the halls of the legislature, people opposed to the idea of a parent trigger accused them of being ignorant, of not understanding how schools work or how laws are made. Some called them a “lynch mob.”

Then, Shirley Ford said, there was this sad reality:

“I would have thought that the PTA would have been beside me,” Ford said. But it wasn’t. “I’m not PTA bashing when I say this,” she continued. “To see that the PTAs were on the opposite side of what we were fighting for was another level of awareness of how the system is.”

Ford is a member of Parent Revolution, the left-leaning group that is advocating for parent trigger laws around the country. She spoke last week at the Jeb Bush education summit, sharing the stage with former California state Sen. Gloria Romero and moderator Campbell Brown. Her remarks, plain spoken and passionate and sometimes interrupted by tears, touched on a point that is vital and obvious and yet too often obscured.

Parents are not a monolith.

The divides are as apparent as the different dynamics that play out in schools on either side of town. In the affluent suburbs, a lot is going right. There is stability in the teaching corps. The vast majority of kids don’t have issues with basic literacy. The high schools are stocked with Advanced Placement classes. And there, behind it all, are legions of savvy, wonderfully dogged, politically connected parents who know how to mobilize when their schools are shortchanged.

The view is starker from the other side of the tracks. A parent in a low-income neighborhood is more likely to see far more teacher turnover in her school – along with far more rookies, subs and dancing lemons. She’ll see far more students labeled disabled and far fewer AP offerings. Issues like these plague many high-poverty schools, yet they don’t get much attention from school boards or news media or, frankly, from established parent groups like the PTA. (more…)

It does sound nefarious: The people who back accountability for Florida public schools, the argument goes, are really out to mine huge sums of money from their degradation and demise. In a weekend op-ed for the Orlando Sentinel, Florida teachers union president Andy Ford (pictured here) mashed the privatization button hard in panning the state’s “flawed and punitive” ed reforms. The accountability system, he wrote, has been “endlessly promoted by legislators who favor for-profit schools, and the Florida Chamber of Commerce.” The state’s standardized test has been “abused by politicians and those wanting to make a profit off public schools and students.” The job of state education commissioner has “devolved into one solely focused on implementing the marching orders of Jeb Bush and the corporate community.”

Yikes! But if all of those folks really were out to make public schools look awful (so profiteers could swoop to the rescue with charter schools and vouchers) they’ve done a miserable job. As we’ve noted before, one key indicator after another and one credible, independent report after another has found Florida’s public school students – especially its poor and minority students – have, over the past 10 to 15 years, improved as fast as students in just about any other state. Matthew Ladner, a researcher at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, has more on this point today at Jay P. Greene’s Blog:

Notice that the “good ole days” in Florida (pre-reform) were a disaster for low-income children. A whopping 37% of Florida’s low-income 4th graders had learned to read according to NAEP’s standards in 1998. A lack of transparency and accountability may have suited the FEA fine, but it was nothing less than catastrophic for Florida’s low-income children. Thirteen years into the “flawed” system, that figure was up to 62 percent. The goal of Florida policymakers should clearly be to accelerate this impressive progress rather than to go back to the failed practices of the past.

Put another way, if Mr. Ford considers this system “flawed” then Florida lawmakers should quickly implement something that he would judge to be “catastrophically flawed.”