For some reason, people are surprised that Florida Governor Rick Scott signed an education bill that will strip funding for public schools and reallocate it towards charter schools.
This is hardly news. School districts and their superintendents opposed the bill, charter and private school advocates hailed it as the new future of education and a pro-charter Republican governor did precisely what you’d expect a pro-charter Republican governor to do.
So, why am I even taking the time to talk about it? Because everyone needs to understand, whether you like it or not, that this is reality – at least for the next four years.
The bill
The hallmark of the bill is that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are being diverted from the Florida public school system into charter school operations. That means public budgets for things like maintenance and new programs will all but evaporate.
This, rather obviously, has employees of the public school system, as well as families who send their kids to public schools, pretty freaked out. There are many who feel this is an abandonment of the traditional education sector – as more money is funneled into charter schools the quality gap between those well-funded programs and the public schools will only increase.
Eventually, the top tier schools may become too expensive for some to afford.
On the flip side, proponents of the bill argue that redirecting the money into “school choice” will only benefit the students and their families. Ask yourself: If I was a parent, and I lived in a city with a public school system but had a well-funded alternative, why wouldn’t I send my kids there?
The state of things
And while gutting public schools seems the most Scrooge-like thing to do in the history of ever, it’s hard to argue with the Florida Legislature given the current state of things.
In Jacksonville, for example, at least 20 public schools have ratings below a C on an A to F scale. From a purely objective standpoint, that means those schools aren’t doing their job and the students are already suffering.
The U.S. currently ranks below the global average in math, reading and science. So this isn’t a phenomenon unique to Florida.
You’d actually have to be crazy to argue that we should stay the course and pump more money into the current system. You know that saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?” Well, it’s super broken and desperately in need of fixing.
At the same time
There are other moves one could make that don’t involve completely eliminating institutions people have come to rely upon. Like, say, reworking existing education budgets to accommodate revamped curricula or innovative technologies.
If the goal here is to give students the power to choose how school works for them, maybe the problem isn’t the physical place and more the programs we’ve implemented at those places. I’m sure that if we asked kids if they’d prefer to have gym for 12 years versus having a combination of physical fitness, tech literacy and economics classes over that same time frame, almost everyone would select the latter.
Our take
At the end of the day, we have an Education Secretary who’s a huge fan of charter and private schools, and a government dominated by people who feel the same way. To think that what we see in Florida is an anomaly, non-indicative of what’s to come, would be wildly foolish.
The debate is still necessary. No one knows if charter schools are the secret sauce to education. But clearly, neither is what we’ve been doing.
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