Over the summer, the Florida Legislature agreed to spend $44 million to fund a scholarship program that will award big bonuses to teachers who got high SAT and ACT scores before entering college — even if they took the test decades ago and can somehow locate their scores. The proposal was so, well, kooky, that it didn’t make it through the Republican-led Senate during the legislature’s spring session, but it rose from the dead in a June special session and turned up in the 2015-16 Florida education spending budget.
In this post, Florida teacher Melissa Halpern writes about what this program reveals about the state’s education agenda in general, a critical view that is far different from anything you will hear from Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor who is running for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination and who touts his education reform credentials.
