Local Control Activists Should Oppose Amendment 8
In 2014, a Collier County School Board candidate ran on a campaign to regain local control of education. Local papers referred to her as a “local control activist.” She championed the idea that teachers, administrators, staff and school board, and NOT Tallahassee, must be “empowered and responsible to serve the students and enhance their performance.” In an op-ed published during her campaign, she wrote:
“We must demand a return to local control of education where school boards, educators, parents and concerned citizens make the decisions to secure the academic quality that will shape the future of their communities.”June 18, 2014 Naples Daily News
That candidate was elected on a platform demanding local control. Her name is Erika Donalds. What happened to her passion for local control?
Ms. Donalds served on this year’s Constitutional Revision Commission (CRC) and is the sponsor of Amendment 8 which, if passed, will strip local control of publicly funded schools (including charter schools), allowing operation, control and supervision of schools established by a legislatively created system; for example, a state wide bureaucratic system of charter school authorization. Local taxpayers will be required to fund such schools, within their district, without any oversight by their locally elected school board. It is the definition of “taxation without representation.”
Amendment 8 is a bundled CRC amendment which was designed to fool voters into giving away local control of public education in exchange for more palatable ideas, such as school board term limits and civics literacy (read more about it here). A lawsuit by the League of Women Voters challenged the deceptive nature of the title and summary of the ballot proposal. On 8/20/18, the Leon County Circuit Court ordered Amendment 8 removed from the November ballot, finding it “affirmatively misleading,” and declaring the ballot title and summary language “does not accurately inform Florida voters of the true effects of the proposed amendment.” The State has since filed an appeal to have the proposal re-instated on the ballot. That case will be heard before the Florida Supreme Court. We will be following the case closely.
A few weeks ago, Ms. Donalds discussed Amendment 8 with Tampa Bay Times Gradebook reporter, Jeff Solochek. You can listen to the conversation here.
Our former “local control activist” was specifically asked about concerns that the passage of Amendment 8 would take away local control of public schools (at 4:08). Ms. Donalds replied that she was really only hearing such concerns from “special interests and people who are defending the status quo in education and the education monopoly.” She claims to hear from parents and community members who support charters, calling them “the ultimate form of local control because they are governed by people in the community…” For the record, charter school boards need not be composed of community members (though some are) and rarely are these boards elected by the community, or even by the parents of the school itself. When Mr. Solochek pointed out that some large charters don’t even have a local person on their board, Ms. Donalds suggested that such large corporate charter chains “exist because parents choose them” and such schools statistically perform better because they have “economies of scale.”
So, apparently, individual school choice now trumps local control for our once “local control activist.” Ms. Donalds’ “8isGreat” campaign suggests that the local control of tax dollars and public education, which she once felt was the responsibility of “school boards, educators, parents and concerned citizens” to “make the decisions to secure the academic quality that will shape the future of their communities,” now occurs “in your family room” presumably where citizens should only be concerned about the education of their own children.
To be clear, the hidden agenda within Amendment 8 is not about whether you believe students should have public school options. If Amendment 8 fails, charter schools will still exist, with oversight from a local school board. Amendment 8 IS an attack on LOCAL CONTROL of public education, directly challenging who should operate, control and supervise the publicly funded schools in your community. Who will pay for Amendment 8’s state authorized schools in your neighborhood? You will, with your tax dollars, and, without local control, you will have no say in how those funds are used.
We must not allow Amendment 8’s proponents to conflate education choice with local control of public education. Education choice is something a parent makes for their own child. Local control of public education is something taxpayers demand to assure the appropriate use of public funds for ALL of the children in their community. Without local oversight of those tax dollars, citizens could be forced to pay for new schools, whether they want them or not, without any way to hold those schools accountable.
Ms. Donalds wants us to believe that the only people concerned about this stripping away of local control of our schools are “special interests and people who are defending the status quo in education and the education monopoly.” We believe there are plenty of charter school parents and school choice proponents who ALSO believe that communities should retain local control of their community’s schools. In fact, in 2014, Ms. Donalds was one of those people.