If you have been following my diaries this week, you have seen what happens when people join together and speak truth to power. I gave up my Spring Break to work alongside teachers from all over the state and around the nation. We made sure our voices were heard and we organized to make sure our movement carries our strength into the future.
President Obama taught us all to hope. Hope is still alive.
Make no mistake, ours is a David and theirs is a Goliath. We are fighting Jeb Bush, a united corporate power structure, and a good ol' Republican legislature. We are about to get slapped down today, as they continue to steamroll their plans through into law.
They will take away my 27 years of teaching experience with one stroke of a pen.
"We absolutely feel that, in Florida, no educator is appreciated and that our worth is very little, especially because everything in the bill is so negative," said Sandy Traeger, a reading coach at Oviedo High School and former Florida PTA president.
The bill would require school districts to adopt merit pay plans that would be funded from a $900 million state appropriation starting in the 2011-12 school year. More than half of a teacher's evaluation would be based on how much the teacher's students improve their test scores in a year. The evaluations would be used to determine who receives pay raises and who doesn't.
Teacher certification renewals also could be denied on the basis of poor evaluations.
"How can you live, pay your bills, be a part of the economic society if you don't know you will still have a job?" asked Traeger, who is not a union member.
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/...
The realists among us know that we will be defeated in the first round. We also know NOT to lose hope. Barack Obama lost some primaries. He got beaten up really bad on the television by Fox News and the swiftboaters.
He never lost hope. We never lost hope.
Hope is still alive.
I should be in Tallahassee today. They are going to ram the House version of Senate Bill 6 through committee and thousands of teachers will be there to protest and speak at the meeting. I can't afford the gas to drive up there, so I decided to do the next best thing.
Organize locally.
We are staging a mirror protest here in Miami. We will make sure it gets on the evening news. We may not win this round, but we still have hope.
And it is working! Check out this random comment on reddit from a link to one of my diaries:
This is great. My pops is a teacher here in Florida. I just showed him this and he told me that a few weeks ago he and one other teacher from his school were the only ones who attended a rally. He said now at the most recent rally almost the whole faculty was in attendance.
See, that is what I call hope. Our movement is grass roots, people based, inclusive of all parties, races, and religions, and full of real power. We are up against a hideous enemy who will surely win many battles, and yet we refuse to give up.
Hope is still alive.