Senator Negron Explains Why Parents Should Opt Out of Public Ed but Not Standardized Testing.

WUSF’s Cathy Carter interviewed Florida’s new Senate President, Joe Negron, regarding his education agenda for the upcoming session. You can listen here. Senator Negron appears to respect the right of parents to make educational decisions for their children, as long as they are choosing private voucher schools, but believes parents’ rights to resist standardized testing will need “some” discussion. He emphasizes the need for test based accountability for public schools but implies that private schools that are “in demand” may require no further accountability. This, of course, is accountabaloney.

Senator Negron was asked “why are vouchers a good thing?”. His response was “I believe the parent is in the best position to make an informed decision on what educational setting is best for their children.” He claims that rather than attend the school for the zone where they live, he is “meeting more and more parents and also administrators at schools, that parents want their kids to attend school where they work.”  The GOOD NEWS for those people is that, last session, HB7029 passed which “requires that, beginning in 2017-18, each district and charter school must adopt a controlled open enrollment plan that allows a student to enroll in any public school in the state that has not reached capacity”, meaning parents can choose to send their child to a school near their work, if they so desire. Senator Negron voted for that bill but seems to imply it does not solve this problem.

What Senator Negron really means is that, rather than give parents the right to choose amongst the various public school options, families should have the right to take public funds and spend them at private schools. Of course, parents have always had the right to send their children to private schools if they choose to, the difference is that, now, Senator Negron wants the state to help pay for it. In Florida, parents can choose to send their children to traditional public schools, charter schools, virtual school, home school and private schools (with or without a voucher).  The overwhelming majority (greater than 90%) CHOOSE public schools.

Senator Negron went on to say “there is strong public support now for letting parents make the best decisions for their students and the money should follow the student.” Currently Florida’s public schools are funded on a per pupil basis, but Senator Negron wants per student funding to follow students to private, often faith based, schools. Would the public support allowing tax dollars to follow students to study at an Islamic madrassa? We wonder.

Senator Negron was then asked where he stood on the “Opt Out” issue, where parents frustrated by excessive high stakes testing have, as an act of civil disobedience, instructed their children to refuse to answer state test questions or “participate to the minimal extent required by law.” (You can learn more about the Opt Out movement at The Opt Out Florida Network.)  Senator Negron said, “It is important for us to measure how students are doing so we have the opportunity to take corrective action when a problem presents itself.” He then repeated Jeb Bush’s mantra “if you don’t measure, you don’t care.”

First of all, this is NOT how test scores are used in Florida.  If Florida annually tested children and, then, used the results to inform that child’s instruction, making corrections as needed, there would be no Opt Out movement. Parents would welcome appropriate use of standardized testing. Instead, testing reigns supreme in Florida and scores are used to rate teachers, schools and districts, determine teacher pay and school funding, determine student promotion and graduation decisions. It is because of these high stakes, invalid uses of test scores that schools have responded by increasing test prep and narrowing curriculum. It is no wonder that families are looking to private schools, without the testing mandates, where teachers can focus on learning rather than testing.

The interviewer reminded Senator Negron that voucher schools are not held to the same standard and public school students (traditional, charter and virtual) have to take mandated tests that are not required of voucher students at private schools. Does Senator Negron support not testing private school students? (Remember, according to Jeb, if he doesn’t measure, it means he doesn’t care about those students). His response:

“I believe there should be accountability for all schools. On the other hand, one of the measures of quality is demand. And if a school is in high demand then that presupposes that a parent has made the decision to take advantage of that particular opportunity but I do believe there should be accountability, there should be mechanisms in place, where using public funds, to make sure that students are getting a high quality education.”

We would like to remind Senator Negron, again, that the overwhelming majority of parents CHOOSE traditional public schools… suggesting the schools in highest demand are those students are currently choosing to attend. Current vouchers (Tax Credit Scholarships) provide $5,886 per student, 18% less than the current per pupil spending of $7178 for public school students and significantly less than the tuition at most “in demand” private schools. (For more on the Tax Credit Scholarship program, read “Florida’s Vouchers are Good Because They’re Cheap”). Of course, school choice advocates will point to waiting lists as proof that demand exists for such programs, never mentioning that, since traditional public schools are required to take ALL students, they will never have a waiting list to compare.

Parents across Florida are not just asking for fewer tests, they want an elimination of the high stakes attached to them. We hope Negron’s Senate will have serious discussions regarding the inequities of accountability amongst the school choice programs and work to level the playing field by allowing public school students all the benefits that voucher sponsored, private school students are given: specifically annual testing detached from high stakes consequences. If Florida’s legislature really cared about supporting parental choice, rather than encourage an exodus from public schools, they would pay more attention to the choices parents are actually making and support public education and an elimination of high stakes testing.