This November’s Election is Going to Have Real Consequences for Florida’s Public Schools

While everyone is talking about Venezuelan immigrants being flown to Martha’s Vineyard, this post explains Governor DeSantis’ education plans for the 2023 Legislative session. In a nutshell:

• Completely dismantle the power of the teachers unions.
• “Modernize” Florida’s billion dollar voucher program by converting it to Education Savings Accounts.

To state the obvious, November’s election will certainly have consequences.

A lot has been written about the recent release of The Heritage Foundation’s inaugural Education Freedom Report Card, which measured four broad categories (School Choice, Transparency, Regulatory Freedom, and Spending) and celebrated Florida as the top-ranked state across the board. The report concludes “Families looking for a state that embraces education freedom, respects parents’ rights, and provides a decent ROI for taxpayers should look no further than The Sunshine State.” The formal launch took place in Orlando on September 9th and Governor Ron DeSantis was the star attraction. You can watch his speech here.

There has been quite a bit of coverage of the Report Card and the Governor’s remarks. For example:

-This news report from Florida Politics: https://floridapolitics.com/archives/555047-ron-desantis-heritage/

-Peter Greene’s post “FL: Endgame In Sight; Heritage Foundation Says Yay.”

-Kathryn Joyce’s excellent piece in Salon: “Florida ranked No. 1 for “education freedom” — by right-wing group that wants to privatize it all.”

Less has been written about the brief Q & A that followed Desantis’ celebratory remarks but they are worth a listen (at 42 minutes). Kevin Roberts, PhD, the President of The Heritage Foundation, spent about 20 minutes asking DeSantis questions in front of what Roberts described as a very friendly audience. Here are the “highlights.”

Don’t Like A Supreme Court Decision? Change The Court

Right off the bat, DeSantis explains that, when he took office in 2019, he knew voucher expansion went against current Supreme Court precedent in Florida, so he simply altered the make-up of the court:

“the good thing is I inherited one of the most liberal Supreme Courts in the country but within 3 weeks in office I was able to replace 3 of the 4 liberals with Conservative Justices (applause) and so we knew that we had a pathway because that decision that was made to strike down previous school choice was even criticized by like the Harvard Law Review as being a very adventurous reading of the constitution andso that was the first fight.”

DeSantis says they anticipated being sued by the union but “they still haven’t sued over it, even to this day, because I think they know they probably don’t have a good leg to stand on.” 

Foundations Urging the Dismantling of Teachers Unions

When the discussion finally get around to the Heritage Report Card, which Roberts described  as “the most important product that a think tank could produce because it is the lever for taking back our schools for our kids and our kids and our families,” Roberts tells DeSantis that  “special friends like Lloyd and Bea Smith and the Pharos Foundation came to “came to us in the last month and said ‘Kevin, you and the Heritage Foundation need to team up with Governor DeSantis and any governor, any state that wants to completely dismantle the power of the teachers unions.’”

Previously known as the Pike and Susan Sullivan Foundation, ”The Pharos Foundation seeks to fund and promote innovative thinking and policy changes that disrupt the traditional school model and create the type of systemic change that enhances learning for at-risk and underserved students from pre-K through graduation.”

I can find very little information about Lloyd and Bea Smith but, presumably they are very rich and conservative.

Becoming Number One In School Choice

Roberts proceeds to ask DeSantis what he calls a “competitive question,” noting that Florida is Number One on the Report Card, overall, but Florida is NOT Number One in School Choice (Arizona had that honor). Roberts asks “what might we look to in the future in order for Florida to be number one in School Choice?”

DeSantis’ answer at 49:35 outlines his plans for Florida’s 2023 Legislative session: destroy the teachers union and further disrupt and privatize public education under the guise of “choice.”

Stripping Power From Teachers Unions

First, DeSantis blames school closures during Covid on teachers unions and asks “Is that who should be in charge or should parents be in charge? We believe in Florida that it should be parents and students.” He also claims the majority of “our teachers” are not members of the union (I don’t believe this is true, since Florida’s teachers unions must maintain a membership for >50% or they are decertified). DeSantis says many members of the union are “not happy with the leftist political activism” of the union, because most teachers got into teaching to help students. So, he suggests there are more ways to further strip power from Florida’s teachers unions legislatively.

ESAs- The Privatizer’s Dream

Then DeSantis calls for Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), something that Manny Diaz Jr, now serving as DeSantis’ Commissioner of Education, has been pushing for for years (We have written about them here, here and here). Unlike tuition vouchers, ESAs are the equivalent of publicly funded, edu-debit cards which can be used by parents to piece together an education by purchasing individual products from an education marketplace. ESAs place the responsibility for piecing together an adequate education squarely on the parents, privatizing not simply public education but the responsibility for providing that education as well. This is not a new idea but DeSantis speaks as though he just thought of it himself:

“We’ll also look at ways that we can modernize our scholarship (voucher) program. In Florida, you get a scholarship (voucher), you do the tuition, and that’s good, that’s great, I mean there’s a lot of good things about it, but there’s an opportunity for some innovation with this. If (instead of a tuition voucher) it’s basically an account that the parent controls that could be tuition but also could be for tutoring and some other services (Roberts nods his approval) then you have an opportunity and it would be good for some teachers, too, you literally, maybe you have a group of kids going to a private school but maybe there’s a really good English teacher that works for one of the district schools, you could have 10, 15 parents pool together put some of their education money to that and have that teacher tutor their kids. So you have a huge opportunity for kind of micro-education and it will be more like, not just you’re choosing the school, yeah, you’re going to be doing that but the parent will be able to make a whole host of other choices to give their kids the most opportunity possible. So I think we will, we will definitely work to make that happen.” (This received a big smile from Roberts and lots of applause from the audience – dismantling public schools is a real crowd pleaser with certain audiences.)

(For the record, Florida already has an ESA program, formerly called the Gardiner Scholarship, now known as the Family Empowerment Scholarship for students with Unique Abilities or FES-UA. Current recipients complain that the reimbursement ‘marketplace” suffers from a lack of customer service and is overwhelmed by the current recipient load. How will it function when all 200,000 vouchers are converted to ESAs?)

Conveniently, the Heritage Education Freedom Report includes has links to model legislation, including Institute for Justice’s model legislation for Publicly Funded ESAs. I’ll be bookmarking this to compare to the ESA bill that is eventually filed this session in Tallahassee.

During the Q&A, DeSantis outlined his plan to further destroy the teachers union and create a massive ESAs program, after explaining how he has created a state Supreme Court that will rule in his favor, regardless of precedent.

Please make sure you are prepared to vote in November.

The last day to register to vote before the November 8th election is October 11th.

Check your registration status here.

Register to vote here.

Because, this November’s election is going to have real consequences for Florida’s Public Schools.