Charlie Crist in A Simple Government, by Former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R, AR)

On Education: OpEd: Vetoed merit pay & ending tenure for political points

Schools should adopt merit programs, which would make the teaching profession more competitive and thus attract better candidates. Merit pay at every school in the country would create a system superior overall to what we have now. We hear all this agonizing about the criteria for merit pay, about the difficulty of deciding who deserves more. The truth is that principals know who their best teachers are. Teachers themselves know who the best teachers in their school are, as do the children and thei parents.

Of course, it is not easy to establish merit pay and abolish tenure. Take Florida, where the legislature passed both reforms but they fell victim to Gov. Charlie Christ's political ambitions. Having changed his political affiliation to Independent from Republican, he vetoed the bill as part of his strategy of moving leftward to try to win a Senate seat in 2010. But at the end of the day, we need to ask ourselves, who loses when we don't educate our children? Everyone.

Source: A Simple Government, by Mike Huckabee, p. 97-98 Feb 22, 2011

The above quotations are from A Simple Government: Twelve Things We Really Need from Washington (and a Trillion That We Don't!), by Mike Huckabee. Click here for main summary page. Click here for a profile of Charlie Crist. Click here for Charlie Crist on all issues.
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Page last updated: Feb 23, 2019