You may hear choice zealots boasting about Jeb Bush’s “Florida Model.” As Tom Ultican explains here, they are delusional or  just making stuff up (to put it politely). 

Ultican relies on Sue Legg’s excellent report and digs down to show that the motivation behind Jeb’s so-called A+ plan was profits and religion, not education.

Jeb Bush and his friends have made Florida into a low-performing mess that can’t attract or retain teachers. But it has become a magnet for profiteers, grifters, and fundamentalists.

Ultican writes:

When the A+ Program was adopted in 1999, Florida had consistently scored among the bottom third of US states on standardized testing. The following two data sets indicate no improvement and Florida now scoring in the bottom fourth…

Last year, 21 percent of Florida’s students were enrolled in private and charter schools. The Florida tax credit scholarships (FTCS) went to 1,700 private schools and were awarded to over 100,000 students. Most of those students are in religious schools. Splitting public funding between three systems – public, charter and private – has insured mediocrity in all three systems.

Privatization Politics and Profiteering

To understand Florida’s education reform, it is important to realize that its father, Jeb Bush, is the most doctrinal conservative in the Bush family. He fought for six years to keep feeding tubes inserted into Terri Schiavo, a woman in a persistently vegetative state. Jeb was the Governor who signed the nation’s first “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law. During his first unsuccessful run for governor in 1994, Bush ‘“declared himself a ‘head-banging conservative’; vowed to ‘club this government into submission’; and warned that ‘we are transforming our society to a collectivist policy.”’

This is a deeply researched and eye-popping post.

Read it to arm yourself against rightwing propaganda.

The Florida Model is an abject failure.