By the time Senate Bill 6 reached your desk on April 9th, the US Department of Education had already announced 11 days earlier that Florida would not receive funds from the first round of Race to the Top Fund grant. In your April 15th letter to Secretary of State Browning, you expressed your support for “establishing differential and performance-based merit pay for classroom teachers” and pledged “to work ardently to position Florida for success on round two of “Race to the Top” grant application.  In your veto letter, among the reasons you gave for your decision was that it would “encroach on local decision-making” authority of local school boards and was “quite overreaching”. Your listed concerns included: • ‘That it did not allow multi-year teacher contracts' • ‘That it chose arbitrary percentages for calculating a teacher's effectiveness' • ‘That it decertifies teachers who needed improvement 2 out of 5 years' •‘That teachers may lose their professional certificates for circumstances beyond their control'  The March 11th analysis of Senate Bill 6 by the Senate Education Pre-K - 12 Committee states that the reforms provided in Senate Bill 6 are necessary to comply with the requirements of the Race to the Top Fund grant. The Committee noted that in order “To receive funds, a state must provide assurance that it will improve teacher effectiveness and comply with the requirements….to which a state differentiates the effectiveness of teachers and principals and uses this information for decisions on evaluation, compensation, promotion, termination, and tenure.”  Additionally, the March 18, 2009 Race to the Top Fund; Final Rule states that in order to be eligible for the grant, States “must not have any legal, statutory, or regulatory barriers at the State level to linking data on student achievement…or student growth…for the purpose of teacher and principal evaluation.” Furthermore, the grant requires the use of student performance data “at a minimum” to make decisions regarding: • “Compensation, promoting, and retaining teachers.” • “Whether to grant tenure and / or full certification” to teachers.” • “Removing ineffective tenured and untenured teachers…after they have had ample opportunity to improve.”  In light of the fact that you are on record supporting the teacher merit pay reforms required by the Race to the Top Fund and Senate Bill 6 was the Legislature's effort to provide these reforms, I have two questions:  1. If Florida had been awarded grant funds from Race to the Top prior to Senate Bill 6 reaching your desk, how could you justify vetoing the bill when it would have meant Florida would lack the necessary statutory reforms required to receive the grant?  2. In light of the fact that your veto of Senate Bill 6 lacked any immediate consequences and you were substantially behind your Republican opponent, how can Florida voters believe that your decision was anything more than a politically motivated ploy to garner support from a largely Democratic constituency (i.e. teachers), rather than a moral epiphany?
A Florida state senator for six years, Charlie Crist went on to serve as the state's education commissioner and attorney general and was elected Governor in 2006. Since then, he has worked to increase government transparency and lower the cost of doing business in Florida.