Thursday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis unveiled a program to alleviate Florida’s shortage of teachers and attract veterans to Florida; see Ron DeSantis Promotes Veterans Serving as Florida Schoolteachers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwWJxU1g1RI
The Governor’s office provided this description of the program.
Military Veterans Certification Pathway
The State Board of Education will consider a rule to allow military veterans to obtain a 5-year temporary teaching certificate without a bachelor’s degree, providing the following criteria are met:
- A minimum of 48 months military service, with honorable/medical discharge.
- A minimum of 60 credits in college with a 2.5-grade point average.
- Score of at least 70% on the Florida Subject Area Examination
- You can work in any Florida school district.
- Background screening completed.
The Florida House unanimously approved SB 896 (2022) which allows veterans to receive a 5-year temporary teaching certification. They will then be assigned a mentor teacher who will work with them for at least two years. They must also earn their bachelor’s degree during the 5-year period to be eligible for a full professional certificate. Veterans utilizing this temporary certificate may not teach subject areas that require a master’s degree.
“It sucks to see all these good teachers leaving because they are burned out and Florida is expensive to live [in]Now is the time, we can’t afford it [it] with our teachers’ salary,” said a teacher calling herself Mrs. Maya on TikTok. “So then the good idea was to put people that have no education on education.”
Can we put this bullsh** about teachers’ salaries on hold? In virtually all school districts in the nation, the median teacher’s salary is equal to or greater than the median household income. The fact that you think you aren’t getting paid enough doesn’t mean you aren’t getting paid what you are worth.
Wisdom from the awake:
In a video with 150,000 views, a teacher known as Millennial Ms. Frizzle on TikTok said she used to teach at a Florida public school near a large military airbase. She described the logic of the new policy as “dystopian.”
“We know about the school-to-prison pipeline,” commented the teacher.
…
“We want teachers to have guns and we don’t want to pay for gun training, so hire military people that are already trained,” she added dryly.
One of my problems with this program is that it strengthens the authority and legitimacy of a profession, which has, according to all empirical criteria, failed. This system puts those who manage it in charge of certification. The necessity for an education baseline is accepted by the system without question. It agrees with a “certification” process that may or may not be anything more than a sham designed to control who enters the teaching business. The same rules apply to charter schools, which is a way for them to be considered another part of the public education system. It recruits foot soldiers to help fix a system instead of people capable of reforming it.
Any effort to get normal humans into classrooms will be welcomed. I’m more interested in people who are willing to teach the basics than those who regale them with stories of sexual deviance. Still, the answer to our education system’s woes lies in putting bandaids on a sucking chest wound by increasing the pool of applicants. The answer lies in new models of public education that are not subject to fads and don’t create barriers to keep competent and dedicated people out of the classroom.