In large part because of Jeb Bush, Florida is a national leader in privatization. It now has more than 100,000 students using vouchers for private schools, including religious schools, despite the fact that Florida voters rejected a Constitutional amendment to allow vouchers in 2012 by 58-42. The will of the voters is an inconvenient distraction to the privatization industry, nothing more.
Even more are enrolled in a burgeoning charter industry, despite the fact that charters regularly open and close, stranding students, and charters dominate the list of the state’s lowest-performing schools. Of course, Florida is a haven for for-profit entrepreneurs, who are encouraged by the state to open and compete with public schools, while sucking taxpayer dollars out of those public schools and funneling it to their investors.
With so much unrestrained school choice, Florida should be the state with the highest test scores and the highest graduation rate. It is not.
On the NAEP, Florida is smack dab at the national average in 4th grade math; significantly below the national average in 8th grade math; significantly above the national average in 4th grade reading; at the national average in 8th grade reading.
The only bright spot is 4th grade reading, and the performance there might be attributable to the state Constitutional amendment to reduce class size in the early grades, which voters approved despite Jeb’s opposition.
Florida’s high school graduation rate is 76% (over four years), as compared to a national average of 81%. Florida’s graduation rate is below that of Alabama, Arkansas, and tied with Mississippi.
What exactly has school choice done for students in Florida except to undermine public education? How does that help students? How does that improve education? Do taxpayers know how many millions of dollars have been wasted due to fraud, incompetence, and mismanagement? And how many millions have been siphoned off to pay investors instead of going to the classroom?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We don’t need no stinkin’ constertution❢
Remember George W Bush’s Texas Miracle? That was all the rage during that campaign.
We’re now on 2 consecutive two-term Presidents with exactly the same agenda on public schools yet I’m constantly told ed reformers are fighting “the status quo”.
I’m not clear on how much institutional power they need- they have and have had the entire executive branch, 90% of Congress and probably 40 out of 50 governors all reciting the same tired slogans. They’re still scrappy revolutionaries battling the evil teachers unions? This IS the status quo.
Before we move on to the next ed reform President, I’m wondering if there’s ever going to be any critical analysis of the current ed reform President.
The Obama Administration identifies access to “free quality” preschool as Number One on their education bill of rights. So why didn’t they put any real effort towards that? Why the focus on expanding charter schools, measuring teachers and testing students? They had no problem attaching conditions to funding regarding expanding charter schools and federal charter school funding flies thru Congress.
Obviously their number one priority wasn’t a priority at all.
http://www.ed.gov/blog/2015/06/the-critical-voice-of-parents-in-education-2/
Obama seems totally detached from his education policies. Clearly, privatization was always part of his agenda. I agree with you. Why are they not forced to evaluate what they have done? It is because they have created this hybrid of private corporation using public dollars. Yet, they should still be accountable to taxpayers. We need to demand accountability!
Priorities are action not rhetoric. They were given a huge pile of money with RTTT and the stimulus. If this “bill of rights” were an actual priority we would see evidence of that.
They spent it on testing mandates, teacher ranking schemes and expanding charter schools. That’s the reality.
When Democrats roll out the preschool slogan they should be called on it. Not true. Not a priority.
I’m concerned with this “high quality preschool” jazz. Usually when the deformers say “high quality,” they mean drill and kill and massive testing.
After Bush’s reign in Florida, he has managed to amass tons of cash through spreading the gospel of the “Florida miracle” at a variety of speaking engagements. We all know the Bush brothers have no problem speaking out of both sides of their mouth and saying nothing of value. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jeb-bushs-income-soared-time-governor-tax-returns/story?id=32137625
Thanks, Diane. Great post, as usual. 🙂 I laughed at Jeb; he’s a joke. I expect this kind of outlandish behavior from Jeb Bush. To expect otherwise would be insane.
Florida is a “pay to play” state. Jeb Bush has access to A LOT of money and he has a lot of clout with the dolts in Tallahassee. The ENTIRE state education apparatus is dominated by blushing Bush sycophants.
As always, comparing aggregated scores doesn’t tell us much if we aren’t comparing like to like. When scores on the non-preppable, gold standard NAEP tests are disaggregated, Florida’s results look much better when held up against the nation’s top scorers.
In any event, where Florida really stands out is in its *growth* on NAEP scores. It is tough to look at how much better Florida did vs. the national average and conclude that it was a fluke, even accounting for the 3rd grade retention policy (which I strongly disagree with): http://www.redefinedonline.org/2013/11/floridas-long-term-naep-gains-easily-outpace-nations/
“. . . the non-preppable, gold standard NAEP tests. . .”
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, man o man, that’s a good one. Gold friggin standard of standardized tests. Fools gold standard that is! NAEP is, as all standardized tests are, COMPLETELY INVALID due to the many errors and falsehoods in the epistemological and ontological underpinnings. Read and understand Noel Wilson’s complete destruction of educational standards and standardized testing “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
“The only bright spot is 4th grade reading, and the performance there might be attributable to the state Constitutional amendment to reduce class size in the early grades, which voters approved despite Jeb’s opposition.”
Florida does not promote third graders who don’t pass a reading test. No doubt this affects fourth grade reading scores.
Exactly!!!!
If it were not for the retention of many, many third graders because of failure to meet reading standards Florida would NOT rank high in fourth grade reading. The Florida educational leadership, Jeb Bush, or FEE do not tell the world how many millions Florida tax dollars has been spent and wasted on third grade retention and will not share with the world the data that shows this retention in the long does not provide for lower drop out rates or higher graduations rates.
So the scores improved in Fla. I have done this in a public school by teaching kids how tests are constructed, by teaching logic, and by reading multiple novels aloud to students. I have also seen reading scores increased by two years in four months by reading Dicken’s novels aloud that entire time. Why does Tim think an increase in scores is all that significant, especially when they started so low? I had a colleague raise math scores among learning disabled students to the school norm by teaching test skills and building their confidence, and he did this in less than a year.
I also saw one kid’s score go up when he realized he would be in a remedial reading class if he scored too low.
I have the experience of giving the same standardized, norm referenced test twice in six weeks. The first time the scores went up one year compared to the previous year. The second time, the scores regressed to the year old score. Statistics.
West coast teacher, hopefully Diane won’t mind my quoting from my first-printing hardcover edition of Reign of Error, pages 44-45, to answer your question about why I think the increase in NAEP scores is important:
“We have only one authoritative measure of academic performance over time, and that is [NAEP] . . . NAEP is central to any discussion of whether American students and the public schools they attend are doing well or badly. It has measured reading and math and other subjects over time. It is administered to samples of students; no one knows who will take it, no one can prepare to take it, no one takes the whole test. There are no stakes attached to NAEP; no student ever gets a test score.”
If Florida schools have no idea who will be taking NAEP or what’s on the test, the theory that the gains represent nothing more than test sophistication is far-fetched. If you are correct in saying that all Florida’s done is grab some low-hanging fruit, then it should be easy for other low-scoring, demographically similar states to replicate Florida’s success, but that hasn’t happened.
NAEP scores are not the be-all, end-all, and there are plenty of commenters here, Chris in Florida most notably, who have spoken at length about what they believe is the collateral damage Bush’s (and other governors’) reforms have wrought. But the fact that there was significant growth in NAEP gives the lie to some of Diane’s claims in this post and at the very least warrants further examination and research.
If Florida voters rejected a Constitutional amendment to allow vouchers in 2012 by 58-42, and vouchers for private schools and religious schools happened in spite of FL voters why didn’t someone in FL take it to the State Supreme Court? Or did they and the State Court ruled against them? Then why not go all the way to the US Supreme Court?
Excuse my naivete, but on the face of it, wouldn’t public tax dollars for private school vouchers, and religious schools almost have to be found unconsitutional?
Can someone tell me if that question has in fact ever been taken all the way to the US Supreme Court, and I somehow missed it?
Helene,
The voters’ d
Helene
The voters decision to reject vouchers in 2012 was decisive. So Florida has vouchers but calls them “scholarships”
A sneaky trick. Don’t let them blabber about the Constitution. They laugh at it.