I did not understand why the local schools were hiring bad teachers to teach our kids, after the numerous "Hot" female teacher scandals here in Florida, I realized that good Teachers were working in other professions because of low pay and the school districts were hiring & certifying without adequate background investigations anyone willing to teach.
One local teacher used to be a stripper, the public found out when she was arrested for having sex with a mentally challenged student(NOT Lafave).
Then talk of layoffs in the city, county, schools, & universities. Those layoffs happened the beginning of 2008 and are continuing.
Fueled by the growth in population, low taxes & no state income taxes, along with a Governor "Jeb Bush" who really did some damage to our children for some time to come (a standardized test call the FCAT under Jeb) and it needs to be scrapped. He ruined education here. This is an example of how bad things have been in this country for a long time under the Bush family & republicans and why I am sick & tired of hearing excuses from the Republicans---THIS IS YOUR FAULT-you were in charge at the time-so man up!
Today I came across an article that explains a lot of what happened to the education system:
National CrossTalk -- Vol. 17 / No. 1 -- March 2009
"Florida's Unnatural Disaster"
The state's economic bubble has burst, leaving higher education in a double bind
By Jon Marcus
Tallahassee, Florida
Add to this a history of political pressure that has forced the universities to open branch campuses all over the map but has prevented them from raising tuition above a level that remains the lowest in the country, and the situation in Florida may be as bad as it gets for higher education. All of this is happening in a state at a time when a flood of people who have been laid off—or expect to be—need career retraining, putting huge pressure on besieged community colleges.
As with many things, Florida provides an extreme example here, too, of what is happening more slowly elsewhere in the country: the creation of a two-class system.
The Board of Regents set up in 1965, legislators decided to rid themselves of the regents by the 1990s, who often got in the way of their plans for campuses in their home districts. The end for the board came in 2001, when it resisted Governor Jeb Bush's resolve to eliminate affirmative-action policies at public universities. Bush pushed to replace the Board of Regents with boards of trustees for each school. Instead, the next year, distrustful voters approved a new Board of Governors, ostensibly to run the universities independently of both the legislature and the governor.
It didn't work out that way. Bush stacked the new board with political allies, including a conservative radio talk show host. It had the distinction of being, according to consultants hired by the board itself, "the least-experienced higher education entity in the country."
Meanwhile, legislators continued to demand new branch campuses, which the consultants (from the Connecticut-based Pappas Consulting Group) found were undersized and overly expensive but were politically popular. The Board of Governors approved new medical schools in addition to the two that already existed and the one at the University of Miami, for which the state provides financial support. The price was so high, the consultants said, it could have paid for up to five new universities.
The education system in Florida is a mess-the legislature is a huge part of the problem and the Board of Governors (BOG) should also be scrapped because the state of Florida is contemplating cutting salaries and the university employees are not state employees according to the BOG and agreements from long ago when the universities were moved under the BOG-so they are in court over this matter.
The original article I linked to is lengthy but it tells what has happened to schools & colleges and the work that needs to be done to fix the situation.