Most predictable thing ever, a teacher shortage, stuns Florida Board of Education members

Oy vey, um, sigh

Where do I begin? You know it would have been nice to have some true educators on the board and a few people that care about public education too but that hasn't been the case over the last 8 years.

Instead we have board members like Gary Chartrand a grocer by trade who have done all they can do harm public education and quite frankly their actions have been both contrary to the public good and shameful.

In short you can't do all you can to injure the teaching profession, such as attack their representatives, decrease their salaries, making certification harder and more expensive, while ratcheting up the pressure and stripping away creativity and flexibility and then wonder why we have a teaching shortage. Well you shouldn't be able too but the State Board of Education has.   

From the Tampa Times:

As millions of Florida's school children returned to classes this week, many schools struggled to find enough teachers greet and teach them.
"We are very concerned about the growing teacher shortage," Cathy Boehme of the Florida Education Association told the state Board of Education on Wednesday.
Her review of three years' worth of statewide teacher job vacancies posted to district websites in the days before school began revealed a disturbing trend.
Two years ago, Boehme said, the number of advertised teaching positions was about 2,400. Last year, the number rose to 3,000.
This year, it reached 4,063.
"That's the acceleration in the teacher shortage you need to be looking at," Boehme told the board. "This is a critical problem we must address."
Olenick suggested the state's education-focused associations could work with the department to seek ideas for funding pay hikes. Board member Gary Chartrand put forth that an independent outside group, such as Florida TaxWatch, might lend some objectivity to the discussion, because unlike the others it would not stand to benefit financially from the outcome.
But Chartrand, too, agreed that the state needs to find some way to make it more attractive to teach here.
"I think the teacher shortage is real, and it's going to get worse," he said. "We should get ahead of it."
He advanced the idea of a special scholarship for aspiring teachers as one possibility, adding there could be "a lot of ways to solve this problem. But I do think it's a real problem."
Gary Chartrand, Gary, Gary Gary, he celebrated when teachers lost teaching protections, is responsible for bringing Teach for America to Jacksonville and their has been no bigger foe to the teaching profession but hey he thinks the problem is real. Well $#^& it's real because you helped make it real.  
He the sites Florida Tax Watch too and you may have heard of them because every year they write an editorial which says the class size amendment is a failure which kind of means they think we already have to many teachers. 
One way to improve the teaching profession is to get Gary Chartrand as far away from education as possible. He's a disaster and a villain.
While he is thinking of convoluted ways to play lip service to the problem, a commentator had a great solution.
Maggie Diaz wrote, Simple solutions: Reinstate tenure, fund professional pay scales, kill the VAM score. That is all it would take. Anything else is distracting fluff.
Cartrand who loves the Best and Brightest, KIPP, and TFA is all about fluff.
But AMEN sister, sadly however since you are a teacher you will probably be ignored.
UGH!

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