Tie Teachers’ Pay to Fcat? Put Lawmakers in Classroom to Try It

A comment on Emily J. Minor’s column regarding teacher pay tied into FCAT results (“Hard to cheer plan to link teacher pay, stressful test,” Feb. 25): The most amazing thing is that my salary will be tied into whether a child comprehends the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, wants to pass the FCAT or really cares about the FCAT. The teacher is charged with changing the lives of children during the school day but has little or no influence on the child’s environment once he or she leaves the classroom.

Why don’t we have the ladies and gentlemen in Tallahassee who think that this is such a wonderful idea come into the classrooms and teach the children for a semester? Not to take publicity pictures of themselves reading to a group of smiling children but to actually teach. And not for an hour, a day or a week, or even a month, but for a semester. Get in all those Sunshine State Standards, all the learning strands, all the levels in the curriculum frameworks.

And, most important, not in an A school, where children mostly are fed, clothed and scrubbed, but in a D or F school, where most of the children eat free or reduced-price lunches, where the children come to school because it’s a safe place, where if they need some clothing or school supplies, a teacher or school nurse (if the school has one) or administrator can go into a closet and get the needed sweater or shoes or shirt or bookbag. And then have these wonderful lawmakers have their seat in the Legislature tied to these children passing the FCAT.

And then tell me that this incentive will make me work harder as a teacher to have my students pass the FCAT. Because, I guess, I wasn’t working hard enough.

SYLVIA TRICARICO

Palm Beach Gardens

Editor’s note: Sylvia Tricarico taught at Santaluces High School in Lantana from 1996 to 2005, during which time it was a C school. She now works at the Fulton-Holland Education Center in West Palm Beach as a curriculum specialist.