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Florida Women, Customization and Choice

ByAccountabaloney

Two Florida women made education news this week. One insisted on the importance of providing a customized education for all of Florida’s children, putting “parents in the driver’s seat”, and the other was able to ban a Nobel Prize winning novel not only for her child or from her child’s elective class but from every other student in her entire school district.

Ironically, both events happened during the overlapping national “School Choice Week” and Florida’s “Celebrate Literacy Week,” and they highlight the status of “choice” in Florida. – specifically, expanding choice to everyone except those who choose public schools.

On Wednesday, 1/25/23, Rep. Kaylee Tuck (R-83) presented the first look at HB1 at the House Choice and Innovation subcommittee, which she chairs. The bill will radically transform Florida’s tuition voucher programs to Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), allowing families to spend public funds on in-home tutoring, digital devices and homeschool curriculum (among other things). Of course, they can also spend the ESA fund on private school tuition, but that is not required (neither are accreditation nor certified teachers, of course).

The bill also eliminates all income requirements, making the publicly funded spending accounts available to all students eligible for K-12 education in Florida. (You can learn more about HB1 here and here.) So, yes, uberwealthy families, who send their children to Florida’s most expensive and exclusive private school, will be eligible for a publicly funded tuition discount but their child’s private school will be under NO obligation to admit or accept other voucher children at all.

When Rep. Angie Nixon asked whether it concerned her that millionaires would have access to the publicly funded voucher accounts (averaging about $8,000/student and originally designed to allow low income students the ability to attend private schools),  Tuck replied “The point of the bill is to expand eligibility for every student, regardless of background, regardless of income status. We want to make sure that every student has the opportunity to have a customized education.”

Tuck also said:

  • We are simply changing the language to ensure all private school families and homeschoolers have the opportunity to have a great education that suits their needs
  • HB1 only allows parents to choose what is best for their children and
  • The bill is simply about providing parents choice, not taking away public education at all

Per Tuck, the goal of HB1 is to “put parents in the driver’s seat” and fund “students not systems,” allowing them to customize their child’s education.

The bill, a priority of the House Speaker and Governor DeSantis, was voted favorably by the subcommittee and will move forward to the House Pre-K-12 Education Appropriations subcommittee, where we will get a look at how the GOP plans to pay for this massive expansion.

Also this week, Pinellas County Public Schools (which serve over 100,000 students) “erred on the side of caution” removing Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize winning novel, “The Bluest Eye” from every classroom and every school library after the complaint of one parent.

Here’s how that played out:

“Pinellas school officials looked at “The Bluest Eye” after one parent, Michelle Stille, objected to it as a reading in her child’s advanced literature course at Palm Harbor.

In a video posted on YouTube, Stille, who teaches at a private Christian school, said she was “shocked any adult would expose 15-year-olds to such explicit descriptions of illegal activities.” In emails to board members, she sent pages that included descriptions of sexual activities including pedophilia.

She said in the video she intended to pull out any of her seven children who remain in public schools, calling them “Marxist indoctrination camps.””

To be clear, the book was not part of the district’s curriculum but was being read in an Advanced Placement Literature class at one of the district’s high schools. Advanced Placement courses are electives and parents of this class had been informed about the sensitive nature of the book and offered an alternate book for the assignment. After Stille complained, the book was not only removed from the class reading list but from the entire school district.

Stille had a several opportunities to customize her child’s education:

  • Read the alternate assignment
  • Take a different elective
  • Use one of Florida’s many school choice options to enroll her children in schools which are not “Marxist indoctrination camps.”

Instead Stille insisted that NONE of Pinellas’ children should read the book, not in the class or as a choice in any school library in her district.

In a Tampa Bay Times Op-ed, columnist Stephanie Hayes writes about the literary value of “The Bluest Eye,” recognizing it is a difficult read but “reducing the text to its most disturbing moments presents a willfully cynical misread.”

I encourage you to read the book and come to your own conclusions regarding whether you would want your child to read Morrison’s book (and at what age).

My own conclusion is that this mom was given PLENTY of opportunities to customize her own child’s education, yet she chose to restrict everyone else’s children’s education.

And THAT is the current status of choice and customization in Florida’s schools.

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