Florida GOP lawmakers move ahead with proposal to end college tenure

[seafan]

First, they came for the teachers of the schoolchildren.


Lawmakers move ahead with proposal to end college tenure

Jodie Tillman reports at Tampa Bay's The Buzz:

March 29, 2011

Now that an overhaul of teacher tenure in public schools is a done deal, House Republicans have a new target: Tenure in the state college system.

On a party-line vote, a House education committee today moved forward with its bill ending multi-year contracts for full-time faculty. Existing contracts would not be affected, but all new faculty would have a probationary one-year contract. After that, they could get one-year contracts.

.....

Rep. Erik Fresen, chairman of the K-20 Competitiveness committee, said the bill is a result of conversations he’d had with unnamed college presidents who felt “handcuffed” by requirements of tenure contracts. He described the bill as an attempt to help colleges deal with budget shortfalls.

.....

The bill is targeted at a fraction of the people working in community colleges. Of roughly 23,700 faculty, about 5,700 are full-time faculty eligible for tenure. Most of the rest are part-time adjunct professors. About 75 percent of the 5,700 full-timers are tenured, said Ed Mitchell, executive director of the United Faculty of Florida.

Mitchell said tenure is not a “job for life,” as Fresen portrayed it, and argued the bill sends a message to all would-be professors: No stability.

“If my choice is Florida with no tenure versus 49 other states, I’m going elsewhere,” he said.

.....

Fresen said adding the universities to the mix would have complicated the bill. Mitchell said he figures universities are next.

Bill would end tenure at Florida community colleges

Lilly Rockwell writes:

March 28, 2011

TALLAHASSEE — With the ink barely dry on the new teacher merit-pay law that eliminates multi-year contracts for public school teachers, Florida lawmakers are swiftly moving toward a similar reform for community colleges.

A bill crafted by a House of Representatives education subcommittee (KCOS 11-03) would eliminate the use of multi-year contracts for all of Florida's community or state college employees, except school presidents.

It also would require the boards of trustees of each college to adopt a performance evaluation system and fire the lowest-performing employees when making reductions, rather than basing those decisions on seniority.

The proposal took some in the 28-member Florida College System by surprise. It was released by the House K-20 Competitiveness Subcommittee on Friday and receives its first hearing on Tuesday.

.....

Either Floridians will put up with this engineered destruction of our state, or we won't.

[Drale]

1. There won't be any need for any schools in Florida soon enough

because all that will be left is the retired tea baggers, who will complain and complain while they keep voting for people who want them dead.

[aquart]

2. Gonna call these boys The Wrecking Crew.

[buddysmellgood]

3. The question becomes: How stupid do you have to be to teach in Florida?

[madrchsod]

4. nothing like attracting the bottom of the class...

i`m amazed that the people of florida are that stupid to vote for these people.

[seafan]

7. I must insert this point here.

Many voters in Florida are not stupid.


The main reason this GOP legislature continues to wreak unchecked havoc is the tight control the GOP has engineered for themselves for the last decade and a half via tightly gerrymandered districts. It has been impossible to get rid of them via the ballot box.

Now that the voters passed the redistricting amendment last November, that prohibits legislators from drawing voting districts to keep themselves in power, the GOP are grabbing, smashing and carting off everything they can, while they can.


There are some seriously uninformed people here, I will grant you that. But many here are very far from stupid.

[madrchsod]

10. thanks for the info...gerrymandering is`t always a good thing

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. Let's talk about one year contracts for legistlators, yes?

[al_liberal]

6. The sad part is most of the state populace won't even notice.

As long as the state colleges have good football teams, they could care less. (no comments on the tense of could, I'm from Chicago).

[Zanzoobar]

8. It won't be noticed until employers realize that college degrees are worthless.

Uh...wait...

[Xithras]

9. Thereby demonstrating that they don't comprehend the difference between automatic and earned tenure.

Unlike K-12, university and community college professors don't get tenure automatically. It is only offered to a small minority of professors, after they have demonstrated an absolute mastery of their profession through research, publications, or leadership in the fields they are educating in. They generally have to work at least 5 years in a tenure track position before they'll even be reviewed for tenure, where their entire career, research history, and interaction with the students will be scrutinized by faculty and administrators from OTHER departments (to prevent conflicts of interest) to determine whether they are worthy. They'll review everything from your standing in the community, to the grades you earned on your college transcripts decades before. Students can, and do, show up in these hearings to argue for or against a particular professor being granted tenure, and MANY have been denied simply because too many students complained about them. About 15 percent of faculty who make it through the hiring process for a tenure track position (which are highly competetive in the first place), who make it through the wait, who are judged worthy by their department, and who are eventually granted a tenure committee hearing, are found unworthy and lose their jobs anyway.

There's also a potential financial disaster lurking here. One of the ways that faculty can justify tenure is by bringing high dollar research grants into the institution, increasing both their budget and their prestige. If tenure goes away, so does the impetus to fight for these research grants.

[RT Atlanta]

11. Your response is very informative!

Thank you for sharing insight into the process - now, if it can only be distilled down to a 3 word slogan for the 'pukes to understand.

[madfloridian]

12. Tenure is NOT given "automatically" in K-12

It has to be earned.