The Florida Governor says he has never had an issue with so much political pressure.  A bill has gone through the legislature that would supposedly make it easier to fire teachers based on student test scores.

Article here.

Evidently all Democrats opposed it   (I suppose due to a tight relationship with the Teacher’s Unions in Florida) and a handful of Republicans.

The problem with these issues is that nothing is this simple.  The ugly truth is that most districts have a rigorous enough evaluation system now to eliminate poor teachers.  It takes building administrators with principles, perseverance and courage to do their job and central administrators and board members with the courage to back them up.  Unfortunately, in most school systems there is not enough consistency in how building administrators evaluate their teachers for teachers to have confidence in being treated fairly. When legislation like this is brought up their fear levels rise.

This is my observation after working with and teaching hundreds of building administrators.  In many cases this is not completely the building administrators fault.  After all, it is the responsibility of central administration to make sure that building administrators are implementing the evaluation systems with some degree of consistency.  Just like a principal would create a grade distribution chart to see how much consistency staff members have in grading students - central administration should conduct annual evaluation distributions to see how much variation their is in how administrators are evaluating their teachers.  Teachers deserve some element of consistency in this respect especially when the stakes for everyone are growing higher and higher.

Just my .02.