Tallahassee Committee Week 1: Highlights and Lowlights.
Reminder: Florida serves 2.7 MILLION publicly funded school children. Almost 280,000 attend publicly funded, privately managed charter schools. Just over 140,000 students use tax payer money (vouchers) to attend private (often religious) schools. The rest, the vast majority of Florida’s children, attend district managed public schools.
Florida’s newly elected Governor, Ron DeSantis, has named a Transition Advisory Committee for Education and Workforce Development that reads like a who’s who of privatizers and school choice advocates. Noticeably missing from the transition team: the Florida School Boards Association, the Florida PTA and the Florida Education Association (the teacher’s union). It is almost definite that, come Monday morning (December 17), the Florida State Board of Education will have appointed former House Speaker and public school wrecking ball, Richard Corcoran, as Florida’s Commissioner of Education, forgoing even the pretense of a national search for a candidate with education experience.
Despite the fact that new House Speaker, Jose Oliva, didn’t even name the majority of his Education Committee chairs or members until after the first Committee week was over, there was some significant activity regarding education this week.
On 12/13/18, DeSantis’ Education Transition team met to “advise” the new governor’s team as they “develop a plan to implement his education and workforce development plan.” You can watch the meeting here. First of all, we are not naive enough to believe this meeting was anything but for show. In Florida, education policy is not decided by committee. Influenced by ALEC and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, the bills and policies that will pass this session have already been drafted and the plans to pass them (easy in Florida where one party is in charge) have been developed. We expect these policies to be devastating to public schools and public school teachers. We have been told we should “fear what’s next.”
The transition team spent two hours on Thursday repeating school choice/ed reform talking points and calling for the expansion of school choice and personalized education for every child. Since the plans have almost certainly already been laid, much of this session was likely designed to give the impression of group consensus or the illusion of listening to new ideas. For example, the idea of expanding the Gardiner ESA (Education Savings Accounts) to all students was floated (at 55:00). Such expansion has been a priority of Corcoran’s for several years. Broadcasting the transition team’s meeting, on the Florida Channel, also serves to introduce certain players as “experts” making easier to explain why they deserve a place on new Commissioner Corcoran’s Department of Education staff.
The Thursday meeting was full of “low points” but we want to draw attention to one particularly disturbing point (which came at 50:50), when Kim McDougall, Senior Government Affairs Consultant at GrayRobinson and Governor Rick Scott’s former Chief of Staff and Education Policy Coordinator, and Transition Advisory co-chair Mori Hosseini, University of Florida Board of Trustees member, trusted GOP advisor and ardent supporter of performance funding in higher ed, wondered “wouldn’t it be fantastic if every student could have an Education Portfolio?” Presumably this portfolio Dr. McDougall described would keep track of all of a student’s education choices (charter, online, voucher, etc.). (No doubt there is a vendor who has already created this product.)
“I think part of it is parents make choices when they’re informed and they have the information. I can get a car on Uber, right? Why don’t I have an App that I can look up from my home as my parent and get the choices in my neighborhood or my city. It’s crazy. Like why don’t I know my choices. And it’s not just knowing what choices, it’s having the information about the online learning, about the charter schools, about the massive school choice already in our traditional public schools…”
Hosseini was intrigued by her comment. He asked “How do you get there when in a high school you have more administrators than advisors? One high school has one advisor, I mean, can you imagine? … So even the parent sometimes they are just… you are right…they could go online and all that but wouldn’t it be great if they could make a call make an appointment and go see an advisor?” (For the record, my daughter’s high school has more than one advisor.)
McDougall responds: “They love Apps… they love apps. The kids will use the apps and the more stuff you have on the apps and technology, not just public education but for any business, the more you have on technology then the administration goes lower.”
Hosseini: “So that should be the answer because, certainly, you’re not going to get the advising in the school.”
A few comments… What are they really talking about here? Adequate numbers of advisors or communications regarding choice options? Public schools are dramatically underfunded, accounting for the lack of adequate numbers of advisors/counselors in the schools. Many of the counselor/advisors that we DO have have been give additional tasks keeping track of the massive amount of testing, retesting and progress monitoring that is mandated by the state. The answer to inadequate numbers of advisors/counselors is FUNDING not an App. Overwhelmingly, especially in the post-Marjory Stoneman Douglas era, public school parents want more counselors, advisors and social workers in our schools. This would require adequate funding.
If the true purpose of Dr. McDougall’s App is to fully inform students of the soon to be massively expanded choice options DeSantis and Corcoran wish to impose across Florida, something that will be necessary if they intend to replace the public system with a privatized one, then we suspect there are already vendors lined up ready to provide Corcoran’s DOE with that option.
For Public Education advocates, there was a brief shining moment in Tallahassee this week. On 12/12/18, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Education met. You can watch the 17 minute meeting here. The committee agenda included introductions and a subcommittee overview. At 15:00, the committee welcomed public school parent and public education advocate, Marie-Claire Leman, to the podium for the session’s only public comment. [Marie-Claire (full disclosure) is a dear friend and we work together with the public education advocacy group, Common Ground.] We strongly advise you to watch her testimony.
Ms. Leman lives in Tallahassee and she “warned” the committee that she planned to come back “as often as necessary to offer a friendly reminder of your responsibility to adequately fund public schools.” She explained that she is a amongst “the vast majority of parents in Florida that choose to send their children to public school.” Ms. Leman is the mother of three children who attend three different Title I, C and D schools in Tallahassee. Though these are the schools that often are referred to as “failing,” Ms. Leman insists her family does not feel trapped in these schools where her children have been successful. Ms. Lehman admits that her children do benefit from privileges that some of their classmates do not:
“We know that that’s not the case for every student in public school. We know that I have privilege. We know that my children have privilege. I have a job that allows me to be here, in the middle of the day, to come speak to you. My children have resources that can palliate for lack of resources in their schools. And this is why we need to adequately fund our public schools so we can serve the varying needs of all of the students in public schools. 86% of the students in Florida go to district managed schools, public schools, traditional public schools. These kids are your primary responsibility. And I worry about our push for “choice.” We need to be sure that we are not just creating advantages for some kids, that we are not creating a way out for some kids, at the expense of all students in Florida. We can’t say we’re striving for equity, which is the mandate of public education, if we are also, at the same time, trying to create advantage for some kids.”
This bears repeating: “We can’t say we’re striving for equity, which is the mandate of public education, if we are also, at the same time, trying to create advantage for some kids.” The primary responsibility of the Senate Educations Appropriations Committee, the Florida Department of Education and our soon-to-be Commissioner of Education, must be the 86% of Florida’s children who attend Florida’s public schools. We hope someone is listening. We are glad there are people, like Marie-Claire Leman, willing to take the time to remind Tallahassee of their responsibility to Florida’s public school children. This year, we will need everyone’s voice if we want to protect our public schools.