Teachers blamed unfairly for school woes

You may not have noticed, but this is Teacher Appreciation Week.

It says so on the Duval County Public Schools' website.

According to the website, Duval's 8,500 teachers "act as friends, mentors, protectors, listeners, cheerleaders and role models ... Teachers are inspiring and their contributions to the students of Duval County cannot be measured by any scale or calculation."

We do appreciate our teachers so very much. Just look at the actions the representatives we sent to Tallahassee have taken on our behalf during this legislative session.

Obviously, we believe it's the fault of teachers that so many of our students perform poorly.

It's not because too many live in poverty, have no parental support and start school behind and unprepared to learn.

It's certainly not because we haven't properly funded our schools. In fact, we're spending too much so we're cutting per-student funding by 8 percent.

And don't try to point a finger at the reams of paperwork we give teachers to fill out or bring up that stuff about making it difficult to enforce discipline.

No, the blame goes to the teachers.

So we are going to make it real easy to fire teachers based on how their students do on a single test, or, in reality, because an administrator may not like the cut of a particular teacher's jib, but we're not going to even acknowledge that possibility.

And the paltry salaries teachers are making, we appreciate them so much that we are going to give them a 3 percent pay cut by making them contribute to their pensions.

As a further token of our appreciation, after years of trying, we are finally going to put an end to droopy drawers in the classroom.

Students who show their underwear now risk getting in-school suspension. That should brighten up a teacher's day.

For the record, we also appreciate the students the teachers are in charge of.

David Lawrence Jr., retired publisher of The Miami Herald and president of The Children's Movement of Florida, summed that up quite well in an opinion piece published this week.

"There is simply no denying the real world for our state's children," Lawrence wrote. "More than 60 percent of our public-school 10th-graders cannot read at grade level. At least 700,000 children don't have basic health insurance.

"Ours is a state that will spend $51,000 to incarcerate a juvenile and less than $7,000 for a public school slot. "We also live in a state where the governor and every legislative leader would tell you that he or she 'loves' children and are eager to do right by them.

"Now, as someone who was a paid skeptic for many years, I have to ask: Would a leader who 'loves' children slash the state's already underfunded voluntary pre-kindergarten program? Would a leader who 'loves' children cut high-quality mentoring programs by more than 50 percent?"

Yes, we love and appreciate our students and teachers so very much.

ron.littlepage@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4284

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