Charters security ruling: An administrative law judge rules that the Palm Beach County District must assign security officers to charter schools in order to comply with a state law passed last year. The school board had refused to provide officers for Renaissance Charter School Inc., which operates six schools in the county. "(The law) clearly and unambiguously requires school boards and superintendents — not charter school operators — to ‘establish or assign’ SSOs [safe-school officers], with the assistance of local law enforcement agencies, to every public school within their respective jurisdictions, including charter schools,” wrote Judge John Van Laningham. He did not rule on who is responsible for paying for the officers. News Service of Florida.

Guns at schools: Two bills that widen the ability of people to have guns on the grounds of schools are approved by the House Criminal Justice Committee. H.B. 403 would allow people to carry concealed weapons in churches that also have schools on the same property, and H.B. 6005 would require school districts to allow anyone over 18 years old to store a firearm in their vehicles on school grounds. Both were supported by the National Rifle Association. The current law allows districts to prohibit guns at schools and their parking lots. News Service of Florida. Sun Sentinel. Gradebook. Florida Phoenix. WFSU. (more…)

Editor's note: This is the fourth and final post in a series on the future of teachers unions.

Over the last 20 years, the federal government and state governments have used standards, assessments and regulatory accountability to assert more top-down control over classroom teachers. As state-mandated teacher evaluation and merit pay systems have become ubiquitous, the level of teacher disempowerment and alienation has soared, and teacher unions have hunkered down and become even more defensive and conservative.

School choice is the way out - not only because it is breaking down public education’s 19^th Century industrial management model, but because teacher unions are so economically tied to this model they are fighting to preserve it, even though it is bad for teachers and students. Ironically, teacher union dues today are used to perpetuate a dysfunctional management system, and to protect teachers from being abused by this same system. It’s crazy.

I say this as a former teacher union leader.

I started teaching in fall 1977. In January 1978, I sat at a table with other teachers and heard a divorced mother with two young children tearfully tell us she had rejected her boss’ sexual advances and now he was ending her employment contract. At the time, we didn’t have a union or a union contract.

I was 22 years old and became a union organizer while sitting at that table. We organized ourselves, collected cards and successfully petitioned the state to hold a collective bargaining election. We won a court case management had filed to block the election. Then we won the election and bargained and ratified a contract that included protections against arbitrarily firing employees.

In 1984, I joined a more mature union (and the school choice movement) when I moved to St. Petersburg, Fla. to help start one of the state’s first magnet schools. The Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association had been a professional association for several decades before turning into an industrial union in the late 1960s. By 1984, its collective bargaining agreement had been in place for more than a decade, and it had established a collaborative working relationship with management.

After the intensity of building a union from scratch, PCTA felt stagnant. The union was part of district management. It did a great job protecting teachers from the abuses of a politically-managed bureaucracy, but there was no energy or vision for progress. PCTA’s only internal and external message was, “We need more money.”

Pinellas teacher salaries increased by an average of 45 percent from 1981 to 1986, yet teachers were still miserable. More money was great, but they wanted greater job satisfaction. Individuals become teachers because they want to make a meaningful contribution to children’s lives, but that’s difficult - and often impossible - in a mass production bureaucracy that treats teachers like assembly line workers and students like identical widgets.

We attempted reform from within. (more…)

Tony Bennett on testing voucher students. From Gradebook: “I do believe we have a responsibility, be it at a public school or whatever, when we are spending taxpayer dollars - and I go back to what I believe we should do, set expectations, set standards and hold people accountable - that we should be able to prove that schools perform for the money they are given.” Full Q&A in Tampa Bay Times here.

More Tony Bennett. Lakeland Ledger: “Let's just hope he brings to the position a more inclusive management style than that of his predecessors."

“Life is combat.” From the Palm Beach Post’s Jac Versteeg: “Good morning, children, and welcome to your first day of first grade at Eddie Eagle Charter School. We will be piloting the new NRA curriculum the Florida Legislature has mandated for all public schools. My name is Mr. LaPierre.” Putting deputies in elementary schools makes more sense that arming teachers, editorializes the Northwest Florida Daily News.

Ed funding. The Gainesville Sun’s Ron Cunningham references the Legislatures “slash-and-burn approach to funding education” in his year-ahead column. The Ocala Star-Banner’s editorial board says the state’s “cheap route on education” is to blame for the Marion school district’s failure to meet class-size requirements. The Sun makes the same case for noncompliance in Alachua County.

On the right track. Broward Community College President J. David Armstrong notes how much academic progress Florida has made in the past decade. South Florida Sun Sentinel.

Career academies. Students in Palm Beach County’s career academies will get a chance to shadow professionals at their jobs, thanks to a partnership with the business community, reports the Palm Beach Post.

Rocky year in the rearview. A glance at the past year in Florida education from the Tallahassee Democrat. Some superintendents want a break from new mandates in 2013, the Democrat also reports.

School grades don’t show much. Editorializes the Palm Beach Post.