The Florida League of Women Voters won their legal case to knock the deceptive Amendment 8 off the November ballot!
The League of Women Voters case against Amendment 8 wins in the Florida Supreme Court. It will be removed from the November 6th ballot. The vagueness of the amendment language and its misleading title: “School Board Term Limits and Duties; Public Schools” was the basis for the justices’ 3 to 4 ruling. This is significant in many ways.
The decision puts a roadblock in the effort to create an alternative charter school system. This is a basic goal of the school privatization effort. No doubt some legislators will continue to push proposals to remove any local school board control of charter schools. In reality, local public schools have little ability now to oversee these charters, but they must authorize new charters. Removing this power to authorize charters is seen as limiting the expansion of charters.
The amendment included three unrelated proposals. In addition to the proposed removal of local school board authority to authorize charter schools were two additional proposals. The first one was to impose term limits on school board members. The second proposal was to require civics in K12 curriculum. Civics is already required in the Florida curriculum; it just was not in the constitution. All three proposals are now removed from the ballot.
This is just another step in the long journey to reaffirm the importance of our public school system.
Congratulations to the Florida League of Women Voters and to the Southern Poverty Law Center!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am thrilled that the Florida Supreme Court shut down the conservatives’ attempt at misleading voters and suppressing democratic input from local communities. It would have allowed the state to drain local district budgets without their consent resulting in unwanted charters throughout the state. Jeb Bush and his cronies are probably planning their next evil move.
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OMG I just wish I could be a fly on the wall of Corcoran’s house tonight. I have a glimmer of hope reading this. My state has become a toxic wasteland for teachers. Constant tears, frustration, fear and hoping to find another job is what I see daily. The nightmare in this country needs to come to an end. Maybe teachers need to start talking more with all adults they interact with. We are so used to just keeping our heads down and using the “keep going no matter what” mentality that has been drilled into us (mostly women) for years. They can’t find teachers. We probably have more voice now than ever. Districts can’t afford to lose us as their is no one to replace us. Now is the time for everyone to start the chatter. Not just here wher like minds meet, but out in the community,churches, clubs, gatherings. Our profession depends on it. The children depend on it. As we always say on this site. They have the $$. We have the votes.
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Congratulations to the League of Women Voters in Florida. I hope there is state by state watch on these efforts to modify state consitutions to favor charter schools and eliminate local control of schools by elected school boards.
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Congratulations and thanks!
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Wow.
I’m surprised the didn’t have a component to require schools to fly the American flag and bam kneeling during national anthems at HS sporting events to camouflage their charter issue.
Bravo League of Women Voters…AND nravonand thank you Diane et al for keeping these stories in front of everyone.
Fighting every battle no matter how big or small is critical.
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I’m reading these backwards (from newest to oldest), so I’m ecstatic that there are TWO great news stories on the education front! (Your Brown/CA post, next.)
I’m very active in our local League, & will print this article out for them. Florida League has done us proud!
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The irony of this battle struck me while I was reading this series of comments.
Conservatism has long claimed localism as its own. But can modern conservatism stake out this claim and make it stick?
Going back into the days when we were colonies of The British King, Americans claimed that their local needs were being ignored in favor of the needs of the crown and its more immediate needs. The separation from England was based mostly on this. During the revolution, western Scott’s-Irish settlers joined the fray largely because of their negative view of a distant, unresponsive government.
The fight over the federalists and their constitution was largely about local control. Not until the first ten amendments were added to the original document did the states begin to sign on to the idea of e pluribus unum.
When issues like the tariff and slavery arose, these issues were debated from a standpoint of state vs federal power. After that battle became a revolution to remove slavery, opposition to the presence of federal control of much of the deep south rose in the face of rising violence that exploded in 1877, despite the bargain that placed Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House and brought occupation troops home. When the riots of 1877 erupted in major cities, it was not sectional but class warfare that had captured the attention of the new industrial America.
But now the conservatives were the people like Carnegie and Vanderbilt who argued for federal control, and they became faced in the decades thereafter by populists from local areas who did not share in the dramatic economic success of the later nineteenth century. These people, the Rockefellers and the Morgans, are the natural ancestry of modern conservatism. They were federalists, if only because they had bought the senate with corruption that has not been matched (some seem to be trying).
Modern conservatism wants to be seen as the defender of local control, but it cannot have it both ways. Their ancestry shows us what they really are: the defenders of a system that dictates economic policy from above and now wants to dictate an educational policy from above. Preaching freedom of religion, they favor one brand of Christianity. Crowing from the barn roof about states rights and federal regulation, they favor standards for education that come from people who are not even elected officials. Grousing constantly about judicial overreach, they place judges on the bench whose decisions in cases like citizens United are so far from literal interpretation of the constitution that all pretense to strict constructionist views is stripped away.
The American right has now shown that it only likes localism when individuals want to occupy National Wildlife Refuges. The veneer is coming off, and the solid robber baron heritage of using whatever idea makes money is showing through. Top down school reform has been the darling of both liberals and conservatives, catching teachers in the crossfire. Business support for deregulation is unmasked as an agent for the further concentration of wealth in the hands of the already rich and powerful.
Can the ballot box handle this coming revolution?
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To answer your question, Roy:
No, the ballot box can’t. Why not?
Considering that only about 50% at most of the eligible population votes in the “main” elections, far less in the primaries and in other “off year” elections, well, let’s just say those that make up that 50%, if they ever choose, would say to hell with the ballot box. That is what they are saying now. Unfortunately, that attitude allows the demogogues and self serving to dominate the political landscape.
At the same time I’d be interested to know more about what you think is that “coming revolution”. Please expand and explain. Gracias.
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So very well said, Roy. And important. Conservatives find themselves supporting top-down, centralized command and control systems, like the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat’s Retrograde Assessment Program, or CCCRAP. And, of course, many are following the lead of Vlad’s Agent Orange in pushing for more centralized command and control here modeled after that of Putin’s new Russia, which in turn has taken part of its playbook from Stalin.
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Duane: the founding fathers were formulating in the constitution a machine that would evolve the best government. Having the enlightenment ideal of nature as a machine set in motion, they sought to avoid the cataclysm of the revolution they had just completed by installing a lot of little revolutions in the form of a voting public, thus conforming to the natural order of things and avoiding all the fighting they saw as induced by the monarchs of Europe and their perverted competitions.
So, when I use the reference to the coming revolution, I refer to the constant change that is history. In education, teacher demonstrations in certain states pushed issues front and center that had long been suppressed. If little revolutions do not occur in societies, ultimately there will be big ones like the Arab Spring started. I hope for peaceful change led by well-meaning citizens. I fear the alternative.
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The Repugnican and Education Deform agendas are both so repulsive to thinking and morally capable persons that both groups (which overlap somewhat, of course) have taken, routinely, to using subterfuge to move them forward.
You will, perhaps, remember when the Oh-So-Reverend Mike Huckabee spoke at CPAC and advised his fellow conservatives that the Common Core label had become so toxic that they should go home and simply CHANGE THE NAME. In other words, he hold them that THEY SHOULD LIE ABOUT WHAT THEIR STATE STANDARDS WERE. And this is just what they did, quite successfully. They followed the minister’s advice and went home and lied about their standards. Most states simply renamed them, and the furor, which had risen to a fever pitch, died down, dropped out of the news. But sewage by any other name still smells. My name for it: The Common Core Curriculum Commissariat’s Retrograde Assessment Program, or CCCCRAP.
Of course, the minister who advised his flock of redbirds to go home and lie about it is the father of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has the appallingly unenviable job of trying to make the rambling, insane, incoherent, morally bankrupt, childish, often treasonous ejaculations of Vlad’s Agent Orange sound like sound policy. What else could one do in her job but lie about what he said or meant? Fortunately, she had training for this. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
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Tennessee standards were barely changed in the area I dealt with in those days. You were correct, the furor died with the name change. The review by teachers was a faux computer-based format that did not allow for any major review, only for an up or down on a statement or some alternative revision. Forget removing big chunks or substituting sensible statements (note that I refuse to call statements that describe desired student educational behaviors standards)
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That these are called “standards” is Newspeak at its purest.
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I’m a League member in WPB, the Constitutional Revision Committee really tried to pull a fast one on us with their carefully crated language in Amendment 8. As a result of the close Florida Supreme Court’s decision one needs to ask, how important is local control of public education? Ask yourself. Who do you trust to establish and manage the schools in Florida, that your local tax dollars will pay for: corporate owned bureaucrats and profiteers in Tallahassee or your locally elected school board?
I believe there is a near urgent need for all local Leagues to work in unison with local school boards to maintain authority in the 67 school districts in Florida. In the US, public schools belong to school districts, which are governed by school boards.
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May this question be top of the list for the 2018/2020 elections in every state across the nation “…how important is local control of public education?”
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Local boards of education should have control over locally collected tax dollars as they best understand the needs of the local community. The state leadership is infested with corporate trolls that do the bidding of the 1%. Their objective is to send public tax dollars to private entities, and cut the local schools boards out of the decision making process. These tax dollars are mostly local real estate taxes. We should not send education tax dollars to Tallahassee that would most certainly use the money as a slush fund for billionaires. The funds would likely be diverted to expand privatization without any local input. It would be a disaster for public schools.
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