Peter Greene writes here about the open theft of public funds, transferred from public schools to to charter schools, in Florida. He raises a question that I have often wondered about: When did Republicans become the enemies of local control? The answer in Florida is obvious: when the money is there to pay the legislators to change their views, they change their views. It is not about improving education, since they are reducing the funds available to educate the vast majority of Florida’s children. This is a pay-to-play sellout of public education. When people vote to put thieves in office, they should not be surprised when the thieves rob them and their schools.
He writes:
“Imagine. You live on the 300 block of your city, and your neighborhood is starting to look kind of run down, mostly because the city has redirected a ton of your tax dollars to the neighborhood on the 400 block. You try to fight city hall, but that’s futile, so instead, you get the neighborhood together, and you collect money from amongst yourselves to upgrade sidewalks, clean the streets, refurbish the curbs, and just generally fix the place up. And then the city sends a message– “That money you just collected? You have to give some of it to the neighborhood in the 400 block.”
“Congratulations. You live in Florida.
“Florida’s elected Tallahassee-dwellers have pretty much dropped all pretense; under Governor Desantis, the goal is to completely demolish public education, with no more cover story than to insist that the resulting privatized system is still a “public school system.” I have seen better gaslighting from a fourteen year old saying, “I did not throw that pencil at Chris” even though he watched me watch him do it.
“The Tampa Bay Times offers some background:
“Let’s check the record. For years, Republicans who control the Legislature have attacked teacher unions as the enemy and complained about under-performing public schools while starving them of financial resources. They would not let local school districts keep additional tax revenue created by rising property values. They gave them little or no money for construction and renovation. And last year, they increased base spending per student by a grand total of 47 cents.
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| We’ll put Swampland Charter right here. |
“Florida has been systematically starving its public school system, so some districts took the most logical step available to them– they levied taxes on themselves to raise teacher salaries, replace programs that were cut, and basically use their own local money to reverse the problems caused by state-level neglect. They stepped up to solve the problems the state caused.
“Last week, Florida GOP legislators pooped out a proposal to stop all this locally controlled self-reliant bootstrapping (because, you know, conservatives hate local control, self-reliance, and bootstraps, apparently, now). The bill, proposed by the House Ways and Means Committee led by Rep. Bryan Avila, R-Miami Springs, says those local districts must hand over some of those tax dollars to charter schools or the state will just cut their state funding even more.
“This is just nuts on so many levels. In addition to pissing on the conservative values of local control and self-reliance, this also thumbs its nose at one of the traditional arguments for charter schools– that competition will make public schools up their games. I’d call bullshit on that point, except that’s exactly what happened here– with their ability to compete hamstrung by Tallahassee tightwads, these local districts found a way to be competitive, including competing for teachers in the midst of Florida’s well-deserved and completely predictable teacher shortage.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Haaaa! When I read the headline “the worst legislature in America,” I immediately thought, oh, this is an article about Florida! Yup, I was right. But New York and Ohio and Michigan and North Carolina have given Florida a run for heir money. It’s particularly sad in North Carolina, which USED TO HAVE one of the greatest public school systems in the world but has seen that system drained of resources and subjected to the standards-and-testing regime to such an extent that now chaos reigns in that state.
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One of the big pieces of news from Florida is the attempt by the new administration to expand, vastly, so-called “scholarship programs.” Voters have consistently beaten back voucher programs in referendum after referendum, so the Deformers have taken to renaming these as “academic scholarship programs” to make them sound more palatable. But make no mistake about it, this is a dramatic planned expansion of voucher programs. If you want to see taxpayer dollars siphoned off to parents who can then use them to pay tuition at schools that teach that the Big Bang was a myth, that the Earth is 6,000 years old, that Cain and Abel rode around on dinosaurs, and that followers of religions other than fundamentalist Christianity are going to hell, then Florida is going to be the state for you–the state run by the American fundamentalist Taliban.
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Correction:
“. . . the state run by the American CHRISTIAN fundamentalist Taliban.”
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I always thought it incredibly ironic that the right-wing in the US so resembles the Taliban that it hates. How well I remember Ronald Reagan talking about the “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan. Here’s the phrase he used: they are, he said, “good, god-fearing people, just like us.” He was talking about the Taliban, whom we had armed to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
I have mixed feelings about fundamentalists. On the one hand, they hold many beautiful, moving beliefs. They care deeply about their families. As individuals, they are often extraordinarily generous and charitable toward other individuals around them who are down on their luck. They often mean well. But then, when one moves from the private, individual sphere to the public one, one gets from them this repressiveness and nastiness toward all who are not like them. There’s a terrible disconnect there, between the private enacting of the values of Jesus of Nazareth and the public enacting of the values of the autocratic oppressor.
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direct comparison: any group which bases itself on the theory that women should be silenced
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There is no ed reformer who is more of a cheerleader for charters than Richard Whitmire. He writes absolutely glowing puff pieces about charter schools that read as almost a parody of ed reform and ed reformers. This is apparently his job- write positive stories about charter schools and promote them to fellow echo chamber members.
He’s mad that a public school got positive coverage in the NYTimes:
“Another harbinger: The prestigious New York Times just last week blew a big wet kiss at LeBron James’s new school in Akron, I Promise School, citing quick score jumps among its third- and fourth-graders. I mean, good for those kids, and good for James. But one-year data from a relative handful of students?”
There must be NO positive coverage of any public school, anywhere! That is forbidden! Public schools all must be depicted as failing, dangerous, and full of drug addicts, thugs and low performers. To quote ed reformers, people only “flee” from public schools- no one in the whole country values any public school or views one positively.
That this dogma is reflected at the US Department of Education and many state legislatures is a shame, and will hurt public school students. It’s already hurting them. It’s used as an excuse to disinvest from their schools. Look at the ed reform track record on public school funding. In the places where they are in power public school students lose funding. There’s a reason for that. They do not value our students or our schools.
https://www.the74million.org/article/analysis-why-the-medias-pendulum-swing-against-charter-schools-has-consequences-and-why-journalists-must-keep-their-spotlight-on-the-trajectory-of-students/
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I looked thru the Florida reforms from the perspective of someone who values public schools and public school students, and I cannot find a single positive contribution to any public school student or school.
It is amazing that ed reform has a “blind spot” and that blind spot is so big it encompasses 85% of students. They offer absolutely nothing of value to public school students and families, and it’s such an echo chamber this goes completely unnoticed, year after year.
Try it yourself. Go look at any of the ed reform schemes, plans, funding initiatives, gimmicks, mandates, etc. Public school students are simply missing.
They not only DON’T offer anything of value to public school students, they don’t even recognize that they might want to. They have effectively excluded 85% of families from what they insist is “public education policy”. In many cases public school advocates are deliberately excluded, in that they aren’t even present or invited when these schemes are hatched and put in.
I don’t know how this ends up, but we probably can’t continue to have people running “public education” who have nothing to offer 85% of students, other than “switch to the private or charter schools we prefer”.
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DeSantis has an agile legal mind, and he is dangerous. He also has a past history with white supremacist groups. The FDOE has also been passing around a so-called study claiming that charters are far superior to public schools to support their devious plot to destroy public schools. Somebody with research skills should examine the “report.”
Parents of public school students are very worried. The conservatives in Florida are not the conservatives of the past. Many of them are libertarians that despise the federal government and are suspicious of any type of government. As I mentioned before, I spent a good part yesterday countermanding the lies and misunderstandings they harbor against public schools and unions. I doubt I changed anyone’s mind. However, falsehoods against public education must be answered. Otherwise, more people start believing the lies. It is interesting that after myself and another gentleman defended public schools, more parents started to post about all the charter scandals and how they appreciate the work of their public schools. That is as close to a win we can get in this right wing part of Florida.
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Do you have a link to the study you reference? If so, please provide. Gracias.
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Duane, I’ve been trying to locate it on the FLDOE website, but it must be buried. I did find a description of “highlights” on this charter schools website. https://platoacademy.net/new-report-finds-florida-charter-school-students-consistently-outperform-their-peers-in-traditional-public-schools/
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Here’s the link to the 2018 Florida testing. http://www.fldoe.org/schools/school-choice/charter-schools/chart
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Thanks!
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Anyone can try this. Go read the US Department of Education K-12 promotions and initiatives from the perspective of a parent with kids in public schools, so, you know, that would be 90% of parents with school age kids.
There’s nothing for you, other than school shooting prevention. They offer absolutely nothing positive. Eventually the public will figure this out and they’ll start to wonder why they don’t hire government employees who work for their schools instead of government employees who don’t. Public schools. An affirmative, positive contribution to them. You know, those “buildings” DeVos sneers at where their children go every day.
This actually occurred in Ohio. After 20 years of complete echo chamber dominance where all Columbus worked on was charters and vouchers, we actually have some effort being expended on behalf of 90% of the schools in the state this session. I can hardly believe it. Someone got the message. They’re not announcing that they’re now working on public schools after a 20 year absence, because that would be a political problem for them, but that’s what they’re doing.
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So true, Chiara!!! Spot on!!! This is truly astonishing. And thank you, thank you, thank you for pushing this point again and again. It’s extraordinarily important for politicians to hear this!!!
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This is a piece by a full time professional ed reformer on how to garner public support for their agenda- they’re concerned because they sense there might be some unrest out there re: The Agenda:
“So: how might reformers find their footing and advance kids’ best interests in today’s political context? First: There are no magic words to erase our big structural issues. Reformers need to shift their thinking to fit constructively within U.S. politics in 2020.”
It simply doesn’t occur to them that one way to garner public support for their agenda is to offer something positive and of value to students in public schools. This is not even considered. They have so marginalized the vast, vast majority of students and families they can’t even IMAGINE offering them anything, in their own political planning.
And these are the pros! These are “public education professionals” who somehow have managed to completely disregard 90% of students and families, and often not just “disregard”. Often float agenda items that will actively and specifically harm those students. In service to the greater cause, of course, charters and vouchers.
https://www.the74million.org/article/analysis-why-those-looking-to-reform-american-education-will-need-more-than-facts-on-their-side-to-win-the-2020-political-debate/
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Imagine if the billions that people like Gates and Broad and Hastings and Bloomberg and the Waltons and others have poured into Ed Deform had been spent, instead, on a) public school facilities such as science labs and theaters and libraries and gymnasiums and health centers, b) wrap-around services for the poorest of public school students, c) lower class sizes and higher teacher pay, and d) food banks to serve the poorest of students. Instead, they’ve poured money into VAM and charters and the Common Core and high-stakes summative standardized testing and done enormous damage. The opportunity cost of these uses of villainthropy have been enormous!!! So much good could have done, on the model of Andrew Carnegie’s building libraries. That was real philanthropy, no strings attached.
But that’s the thing. Gates et al LOVE the strings they attach to their funding. They view themselves as social engineers. What they do is not simple giving where there is need. Instead, they are experimenting on kids.
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Here’s one really great possible use of philanthropy in education: Use it to reduce teacher workloads–to hire more teachers so that individual teachers in a school have fewer classes to teach and more time to devote to a) grading, b) tutoring, and c) meeting with other teachers in quality circles like Japanese Lesson Study to plan, to share materials, and to discuss what’s working and what’s not.
One of the great unspoken truths about US education is that teachers simply do not have the time in which to do their jobs as well as they might. This is a HUGE problem.
There is a scene in the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar in which Jesus is surrounded by a vast crowd of lepers, pushing in on him until he screams, “Enough.” I suspect that many would consider this scene somewhat blasphemous. But when I started teaching years ago, I had a dream one night that exactly the same thing was happening to me. Students were crowding in on me–hundreds of them, all so desperate and so needy, and it was just too, too much. There wasn’t enough of me to deal with all the problems.
Reduce teaching loads by a third. That’s a change that would make an enormous difference.
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By a third?
For many more like 2/3.
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I would be happy for a third, but yes, that would be more reasonable. Teaching well, like writing a book well, requires an enormous amount of time for reflection. K-12 teachers have almost none.
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I know I’ve got this not quite right, but a similar thing happened in Vermont for different reasons. the state wanted “gold coast” towns to subsidize those districts not so well endowed when they taxed themselves at a higher rate to be able to provide more dollars for education. the state required them to raise an equal amount to give to the state for those less fortunate districts. The communities affected came up with a workaround: they started private foundations to fund pet education projects. I have no idea what the status of such programs is at this point. Perhaps some Vermonters could weigh in on this topic.
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