Bright Futures and Other Destructive Bills Are on the Move
This week, public pressure led to the temporary postponement of SB86, this year’s bill chipping away at Florida’s Bright Futures college scholarship program. The bill had been scheduled to be heard by the Senate Education Committee on Tuesday, March 9, and has now been placed on the committee’s March 16th agenda. The bill is controversial for several reasons, including:
- It requires the Board of Governors (BOG) and State Board of Education (FLBOE) to each approve a list of career certificate, undergraduate, and graduate degree programs that “lead directly to employment.” Then, beginning in the 2022-2023 academic year and thereafter, the amount of financial aid a qualified student receives will depend on whether their major is on that approved list. Students choosing to major in something other than the approved list (Arts? Music? Literature?) will have their Bright Futures funding cut off after 60 credit hours, leaving them on their own to fund their junior and senior years.
- Beginning in the 2022-2023 academic year, students who earned college credit in high school, by passing AP exams or taking dual enrollment classes, will see their Bright Futures award reduced by the number of credit hours earned by taking rigorous courses in high school. Currently, students use earned credits from accelerated coursework to satisfied general education requirements allowing them to double major or even begin graduate school using their Bright Futures scholarship. Students are counseled to take rigorous course loads in high school, to be best prepared for college but, if these SB86 provisions pass, such coursework will serve to diminish their scholarship reward.
Since its inception, in 1997, Florida’s parents have counted on Bright Futures, funded by lottery proceeds, to help them pay for their child’s college education. The program was solely based on academic merit and not on financial need. At the program’s peak in 2008, it provided scholarships to 39% of Florida high school graduates, including 94 percent of incoming freshmen and 70 percent of all undergraduates at the University of Florida. In 2011, the Florida Legislature enacted cuts to Bright Futures funding by increasing the minimum SAT score required to qualify for the program. By the 2015-16 school year, the program covered only 20% of Florida high school graduates, with fewer minority and low income students qualifying for the scholarship. SB86’s passages will further reduce access to Bright Futures, taking aim at the recipients field of study.
““We’re saying that we’d prefer the degree you’re getting leads to a job, and I think that’s fair. If it’s taxpayer money paying for your education, then the taxpayer should have the opportunity to look at what degree is being gotten and which lead to jobs.” – Senate President Wilton Simpson.
Not surprising, students and parents across Florida are not pleased with these changes. Shouldn’t students be encouraged to follow their passions? College students (and their parents) are organizing. You can join their efforts here. Even the FSU Young Republicans Club came out in opposition of SB86.
Here’s a little secret I want to share with the FSU College Republicans: So many of the Education Bills moving through the Legislature this session will ultimately punish or hurt the hard-working students of the great state of Florida, because their underlying intent is to privatize rather than invest in Florida’s education system – both at the college and the K-12 level.
Here are a few of the bills that are currently moving through session:
Voucher Expansion
SB48 is poised for a Senate floor vote. You can read about it here, here and here. It massively expands and transforms Florida’s $1 billion/year voucher program into Education Savings Accounts (ESAs). ESAs unbundle the components of a public education and rely on parents to reassemble their child’s education on a private marketplace. They are the ultimate in school privatization, lacking academic accountability and fiscal transparency. SB48 has sailed through the Senate along party lines. We are still waiting for the House companion to drop, but have be assured it will be more radical than the Senate version.
Charter Schools
HB51/SB1028 Alternate Charter Authorizer – This is the third year this bill has been brought forward. It would allow state universities & Florida College System institutions to sponsor publicly funded charter schools, which currently falls under the Constitutional responsibility of local, duly elected school boards: Article IX Section 4 (b) – “The school board shall operate, control and supervise all free public schools within the school district and determine the rate of school district taxes within the limits prescribed herein.” During the three sessions this bill has been brought before the Legislature, it has never had support from the state college or university system. They are not asking for this. The goal here is to create a state wide, alternate charter school authorizer, something that has been attempted (and failed) many times. Earlier attempts by then Rep. Manny Diaz Jr. (in 2015) and Constitution Revision Commissioner Erika Donalds (in 2017) were to amend the Constitution. Now the goal appears to create a statewide authorizer via the university system. If these bills pass, new charter schools (like the Hilsdale College Barney Classical charter schools Erika Donalds establishes through her Optima Foundation or the charter schools run by Manny Diaz’s for-profit employer, Academica, perhaps?) could shop around for an authorizer, avoiding the oversight of their elected school boards, and choose the authorizer, funding source and accountability system, that “best suits their needs,” creating yet another parallel system of publicly funded school, despite the constitutional mandate for a “uniform system of free public K-12 schools.”
Other Charter School bills – SB1468, HB1031, SB1300 – have yet to be heard in committee.
Disempowering School Boards
Another perennial challenge has been School Board Term Limits. Elected school boards are seen as an impediment to privatization and, frankly, would be completely unnecessary in a fully privatized public education system where individuals made all the decisions for their families. Chipping away at elected school board authority has been a relentless pursuit of the privatizers. Instituting school board term limits, however, would require a Constitutional Amendment. So far, Rep. Sabatini’s HJR 11 and Sen. Gruters’ SJR1642 have yet to be heard in committee, but, since Gruters is Chair of the Education Committee, his bill will surely find its way onto the agenda there.
An interesting twist this year is Rep. Garrison’s HJR1461 (it has a possible companion in Rodrigues’ SB1180). HJR1461 eliminates school board compensation, making elected school board members the only uncompensated constitutional officers. If the bill passes, and the corresponding amendment is approved by voters in 2022, newly elected school board members would receive no salary and salary would be phased out for current school board members, re-elected on or after November 2022, after eight years of consecutive service. This appears to be an end around term limits. Garrison’s bill was heard this week in the Secondary Education & Career Development Subcommittee and passed along party lines. You can watch the discussion here. Opponents argued that eliminating school board salaries would impact the diversity of members, making it more difficult for lower income, working people to serve. Such concerns were dismissed by the bill sponsor who compared school board service to parent participation in their school’s PTA. Committee member Rep. Andrade suggested that eliminating salaries would “empower” school board members, ensuring they are “there for the right reasons.” Gee… I wonder if that would work for legislators?
Disempowering the Teachers Union
The right to collective bargaining is enshrined in Florida’s Constitution (Article 1, section 6) but, nevertheless, attacking teachers unions appears to be a favorite pastime of many legislators. This year, they wasted no time placing SB78 on the fast track. SB78, filed by Lee County Republican, Senator Ray Rodrigues, has been dubbed the “union busting bill.” It would add additional restrictions to payroll deductions for union dues from public-employee paychecks, requiring confirmation in addition to written request. The bill passed its first two committee stops along party lines but appears to be temporarily stalled in the Senate Rules committee, probably because it affects all public unions. Its identical House companion, HB947, passed its first committee on 3/8/21 and it waiting to be heard in State Affairs.
If lawmakers are unable to “bust” all public unions, they still have options to, specifically, disempower the teachers union. SB1014 (Baxley)/ HB835 (Byrd) also complicates how members of teachers unions can pay their dues, prohibiting payroll deduction. Such prohibitions would only apply to teachers unions. Other public unions (Police, Fire) would not be affected. Byrd’s bill received favorable approval in its first committee stop, House Government Operations Subcommittee, on 3/8/21. Baxley’s bill will be heard in its first committee, Governmental Oversight and Accountability, on 03/17/21, 9AM.
Get Your Kids Ready for Testing, Testing and More Testing
No “good” legislative session would end without some sort of tweak to Florida’s test and punish accountability system. Last year, bills mandating regular, standardized, progress monitoring assessments for preschoolers failed to reach the Governor’s desk. This year, multiple bills are intent on expanding testing for preschoolers and more.
When the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores were released, Florida’s Reading scores had plummeted, erasing any gains seen in the previous 10 years. ACT scores for the high school Class of 2019 show that rates of college readiness in English and math have sunk to record lows. At the same time, Florida’s average score on the SAT college entrance exam dropped 15 points to 60 points below the national average. Public Education advocates suggested the results were evidence of the failure of No Child Left Behind-like, test and punish accountability systems. Corporate Ed reformers (who created the mess) doubled down on the need for more rigorous test and punish policies. Florida’s Commissioner of Education agreed: “Today’s NAEP results make it very clear that unless we start raising expectations for students, we will continue to see stagnant growth.” Their lack of self reflection is astounding. They have been fully in charge of public education policy in Florida for 20 years. Did they consider the possibility that their policies might be failing? What if the problem is too much accountabaloney?
This being Florida, of course, meant the proposed solution to stagnant performance was to “assess more.”
Last year, the focus was on state mandated, progress monitoring for preschoolers. Rep. Erin Grall’s (R-54, Indian River) Early Learning and Early Grade Success bill failed to make it to the Governor’s desk last year, so she has filed the identical bill this year. On 3/3/21, Grall’s HB419 passed its first (of 5) committee stops (Early Learning & Elementary Education Subcommittee). Last year, when Grall filed this same bill, expanding high stakes testing to pre-school, we called it “possibly the most egregious education bill ever filed in Florida and that says a lot.” It remains pretty darn egregious, which is why it is so concerning that it has attracted two democratic co-sponsors, Andrew Learned (D-59, Hillsborough) and Allison Tant (D-9, Leon). The senate companion, Gayle Harrel’s SB1282, is waiting to be heard.
Grall’s HB419 creates a new VPK accountability system based on performance metrics that include student outcomes and learning gains calculated from a state mandated, coordinated screening and progress monitoring program for VPK through grade 3 students. Grall insists such progress monitoring is needed because of her extreme concerned regarding “kindergarten readiness,” reporting that 43 percent of Florida’s kindergarteners fail the current screener administered to them during their first month of kindergarten. What if the problem is not the children but, rather, the screening assessment itself?
As edu-blogger Peter Greene points out in his piece titled “FL: Let’s Assess Four Year Olds“:
Clearly there is a problem, and the Florida legislature has been steadfast about looking for that problem in the wrong place.
If half of your five year olds are “not ready” for kindergarten, the problem is with either A) your instrument for measuring readiness and/or B) your expectations for what “readiness” looks like…
Grall’s solution to this mis-diagnosed problem is –surprise–more tests sooner. This, among other things, demonstrates mission creep–the original point of the VPK tests, given to littles at the beginning of kindergarten (because what a great way to introduce littles to school) was to measure the effectiveness of Florida’s various pre-K programs. Now Grall wants it to provide readiness feedback for parents, but to do that, we need to do more assessment sooner.
Grall isn’t the only one insisting on “more tests sooner.” “More assessments” should be considered the unofficial Florida State Motto. Florida is readying itself to bring back state mandated progress monitoring for grades VPK-8.
On 3/16/21, Senator Ana Maria Rodriguez will present SB1898, Student Literacy, before the Senate Education Committee. SB1898, similar to HB7011, a committee bill from Chair Aloupis’ Early Learning and Elementary Education Subcommittee, will mandate, beginning in the 2022-23 school year, that all VPK providers and public schools must regularly assess all of their VPK-8th grade students using a “coordinated screening and progress monitoring system” developed by the state. Participation in these progress monitoring assessments will be mandatory. The progress monitoring data will then be used to assess kindergarten readiness, calculate learning gains, and identify students as young as pre-school as having “substantial deficiencies.”
Commissioner Corcoran is celebrating this intensive use of progress monitoring data in his (and the FLBOE‘s) quest of having 90% of students achieving “Grade-Level or Above” performance by 2024. He refers to this as Florida’s “moon shot” and believes we will get there by targeted, data driven education and state mandated progress monitoring. Over the summer of 2020, Corcoran spent $10 million of CARES funding creating a state wide progress monitoring tool with the express goal of moving Florida to 90% reading proficiency by 3rd grade. Again, it is very “Florida” to spend Covid relief funds to create new assessments.
My predictions: parents and teachers are going to hate all the testing. How do I know? Because it wasn’t that long ago that they fought to eliminate such progress monitoring mandates.
In 2015, in response to an outcry from parents and school districts regarding the number of state mandated assessments in schools, the Governor Rick Scott announced his “Let’s Keep Florida Learning Plan” which called on then Commissioner Pam Stewart to “conduct a thorough and comprehensive investigation of every standardized test” in Florida. In February 2015, Stewart released a report outlining recommendations to reduce the assessment burden on students and schools. One recommendation: “eliminate state mandated progress monitoring requirements,” returning progress monitoring decisions to the districts. This was accomplished with the passage, with broad bipartisan support, of 2015’s HB7069, which was celebrated as a step in the right direction towards reducing the testing burden on Florida’s children.
Now Corcoran and Senator Rodriguez wants to rescind that local control of progress monitoring, requiring statewide progress monitoring for even our youngest learners.
Grumpy Old Teacher wrote a great piece about progress monitoring and how focusing on the “need for a better score” ignores the real educational needs of children. He says:
“the scandal of our time is the number of persons who know better and should fight for children, but instead pretend that increasing test scores substitute for true learning.”
SB1898 and its companion, HB7011, mistake test scores for true learning and are not in the best interest of Florida’s children. It is possible that they have overtaken Grall’s VPK bill as “the most egregious education bill ever filed in Florida.” After 20 years of test and punish, our children are over-tested and suffering. Our NAEP scores are flat. We don’t need more ways to collect data. As Grumpy Old Teacher says “We’re so focused on our adult needs and disputes we forget how this tramples on children.”
What’s Happening In Tallahassee This Week
This week, I’ll be watching for the House companion to SB48, as well as:
3/15/21 1:00 PM Children, Families & Seniors Subcommittee
- HB419 Grall’s High Stakes Testing in VPK
3/16/21 9:30 AM House Early Learning & Elementary Education Subcommittee
- HB51 McClain’s Alternate Charter Authorizer
3/16/21 12:30 PM Senate Education
- SB86: Baxley’s Bright Futures
- SB 1898: Rodriguez’s VPK-8 progress monitoring
03/17/21, 9:00 AM Governmental Oversight and Accountability
- SB1014: Baxley’s “Union Busting”
Follow the links to the committees to find contact information for committee members and give them a call, asking them to oppose these bills. All committee meetings will be broadcast on thefloridachannel.org. Stay involved and help push back on these bills which will ultimately punish or hurt the hard-working students of the great state of Florida.