He's holding a press conference right now.
He's listing reasons why he's vetoing this bill.
It's interesting that he states that (among other things) that it infringes upon the "constitution rights" of local school boards to set standards locally, saying the legislation overrides many issues of local interest. He called it "heavy handed". This position coincides with recent diaries here about the strange alliance of the Tea Baggers position on this bill (they oppose it) and the teachers' position on it.
This, as Ryan Fike mentions in his excellent diary, is grassroots activism in ACTION. We're FIRED UP here in Florida.
Crist was very detailed about his reasons for the veto, notably citing the fact that the bill takes nothing into account for teachers of learning disabled or special needs children. Charlie Crist comes from a family of educators. I never doubted that he didn't like the bill, only whether he had the political will to veto it given his position in the Senate race.
He also listed specific things in the bill that were troublesome for him, including the fact that teachers stand to lose their jobs and teaching certificates over things over which they have little control. He cited the lack of clear means of assessing the progress and his discomfort using such vague assessments to make sweeping decisions about teachers' and childrens' education.
I'll update more including adding a video as it becomes available.
BTW, Rubio ran a series of commercials right before this press conference touting Crist's constituency as the YES WE CAN crowd.
SUMMARY OF SB 6 can be found here but here's the nuts a bolts of it:
- It ties teacher pay, employment and tenure to student achievement
- Essentially places arbitrary Tallahassee-made restrictions on local school board decisions
- Fails to recognize degrees, experience or other teacher achievements by local school boards when they make pay increases and advancement decisions
- Uses student test scores as the primary determinant of teacher employment
- Tenure? Fuggeddaboutit. If your students' test score suck, you can be fired on the spot or placed on probation for 5 years.
Need I go on? This bill was SO bad that only idiots would like it. In fact, many more reasonable republicans I know were appalled by it as much as were Democrats. This has been largely a uniting issue which would explain why Crist's office received opposition calls on this bill by a 20:1 ratio.
I'm awaiting video. Will update as soon as it becomes available.