The damaging legacy of Jeb! Bush, Vol. 4: School spending next to last in U.S.

Blast Off!'s continuing series about the damage done to Florida by Jeb! Bush and his minions looks once more at education, where the former governor's scorched-earth strategy seems to have had the most effect.

A report in today's Palm Beach Post reveals that Florida ranks next-to-last among the states and the District of Columbia in school spending relative to wealth.

For every $1,000 of residents' personal income, Florida spends $33.51 compared with the U.S. average of $43.34. Comparably poor Georgia ranks 13th, spending $48.21 for every $1,000.

Residents in South Florida and parts of the Treasure Coast, also bear an uncommon share of the burden.

Though local school districts spend less on education per student than the national average, they tend to pay a much larger portion of the bill.

Local funding in property-rich Palm Beach and Martin counties accounts for 70 percent and 74 percent, respectively, of all education spending, compared with 48 percent for the average U.S. school district. St. Lucie County is closer to the norm. It ponied up 55 percent of total school funding in 2006.

Palm Beach County is more generous than Treasure Coast school districts when it comes to spending per student, but it still pays only $8,345 compared with a national average of $9,138. Martin spends $7,674 and St. Lucie $7,239 per child.

The U.S. Census Bureau this week released detailed public school finance figures for every U.S. school district from the 2005-2006 school year as part of an annual report.

Given the state's budget crisis, local school districts will be forced to cover even more of the cost to educate Florida's children, said Vern Pickup-Crawford, a lobbyist for Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie county school districts.

The state employs a Robin Hood formula, which takes money from districts with high property values and healthy tax rolls and feeds a portion to poor districts. There have been three lawsuits in the 30 years since the formula was enacted, Pickup-Crawford said. The courts upheld the formula in each case.

Meanwhile, on the same page of the paper, we see that the ludicrous and destructive Crist-Rubio revenue slashing has increased the burden on school districts profoundly.

The Palm Beach County School District will have to ax between $25 million to $30 million next school year under proposals released Wednesday by the Florida House and Senate.

It was no surprise for the district, which had expected next year's $1.5 billion operating budget to be the worst it's seen in more than a decade, but it comes at a time when the district has already made cuts to its budget and faces rising costs for utilities, fuel and health insurance.

"We have a challenge," Superintendent Art Johnson said at a school board discussion on the budget. "We do not have a crisis at this point, but it's not business as usual."

[...]

If passed, the budget would mark the first time in a decade the district is getting less money from the state than the year before. Just two years ago, the budget grew by $99 million.

The district is faced with making the cuts a few months before it opens three new schools, which will increase spending on electricity and personnel by $3 million. The interest it earns on investments is also decreasing, which will leave the district with $5 million less than a year ago.

Unlike in previous tough budget years, when the district could leave teaching positions unfilled to save money, the state's class-size amendment requires caps on class size, making it more difficult to make significant cuts in the budget.

I realize all of this has been a conscious strategy by Jeb! and his GOP sycophants, later folks like Crist and Rubio, to destroy public education in an effort to advance truly repugnant ideas like privatization and vouchers. However, the real damage is done to our children, who are left behind as always by Republicans. You see, needless to say, Republicans don't give a shit about children or education or the poor, no matter what rhetoric they might use to suggest otherwise. All they care about is making themselves and their cronies richer, and one way some believe they can do that is to privatize everything.

Republican rule has been disastrous for Florida, economically, educationally, culturally, and morally. As a former educator and one with two small children who are or will be in Florida public schools, I'm disgusted with the way education has been minimalized and compartmentalized by our state's leaders.

It's going to take years to undo the damage done by the Bushies, but we're going to have to start by kicking the idiots out, beginning this fall. A tall order, I know, given the social conservatives who dominate the state outside of the Glans™ ... but just as Howard Dean's 50-State Strategy brought gains in Congress for the Democrats, so too must we implement a 67-County Strategy in Florida. Our kids deserve our best effort ... and under GOP rule, they're getting far from it.

The damaging legacy of Jeb! Bush, Vol. 3: More trouble for Florida's state universities

As an employee of a state university in Florida, I'm acutely aware of the harmful effects of the state's budget crisis on our higher education system, which thanks to Jeb! Bush's destructive policies already has been laboring under the weight of an ignorant and nonsensical political bureaucracy. In the third installment of my occasional series, "The Damaging Legacy of Jeb! Bush," I'm looking at education once again, but after the FCAT and intelligent design, it's time to turn to the postsecondary side.

Jeb! decimated both the eleven institutions of the State University System and the state's 28 community colleges (one of which also employed me at one time) by shifting their leadership from a centralized Board of Regents to a powerless Board of Governors and individual boards of trustees -- who are politically appointed by the governor.

As a result, our state has 39 dysfunctional, disconnected, and disassociated institutions of higher learning, run by people who generally have little or no understanding of or interest in education at all. And it's only getting worse.

According to the report [by college readiness group Enlace Florida], if Florida's financial resources don't improve, the state's limited-income students will soon find the doors of institutions of higher learning closed to them.

"The fact that tuition at Florida's universities is the lowest in the country does not mean that Florida's students can afford the cost of attendance," [Enlace Florida executive director Paul] Dosal said in the report.

He said Florida invests little money in need-based financial aid. The biggest amount is $400 million, from the Bright Futures Scholarship program. Bright Futures accounts for 80 percent of the total financial aid — and about 20 percent of those dollars is given on the basis of need, Dosal said in his report.

The report states, "A student who receives the Academic Scholars Award (the highest Bright Futures Award) would find that the award covers less than 23 percent of the total cost of attending Florida Atlantic University, Florida International University, University of Central Florida or University of South Florida."

[State higher education chancellor Mark] Rosenberg told university stakeholders at the December Board of Governors' meeting to expect further budget cuts before the end of the fiscal year.

"This could mean layoffs. This could mean a reduced number of classes for students. We continue to dig ourselves in to a deeper and deeper hole," he said.

He apologized to students, university employees and alumni of public colleges and universities.

"Whatever rankings that their institutions have are, unfortunately, likely to slide further, de-valuing the degree of a Florida public university," he said.

I've worked for three of these 39 institutions in my career. I've seen firsthand the effects of the instant budget crisis, and I've seen students struggle and battle to stay in school despite crushing financial pressures. In short, the horrific fiscal management of the Jeb! Bush administration merges here with their systematic and wholly intentional dismantling of Florida's system of higher education, with disastrous results for tens of thousands of students.

It's appalling. It's disgusting. And it's another reminder that the nation's tragic "Bush Boom" is exacerbated in Florida, because we're trying to overcome not only Drunky McStagger's profound idiocy, but also that of his younger -- and allegedly smarter -- brother.

The damaging legacy of Jeb! Bush, Vol. 2: Intelligent design in the schools

In the first installment of this occasional series, we examined the damage done to Florida's K-12 education system by Jeb!'s FCAT. Today, another look at education, where the destructive policies and nutjob appointees of Jeb! Bush are leading to another assault on education and reason.

The State Board of Education is debating science standards for Florida schools. And one Board member, Bush appointee Donna G. Callaway of Tallahassee, is planning to vote against the proposed standards because they include evolution.

Okay, to be totally accurate, it's not so much because they include evolution, but rather because they don't include other "theories."

Callaway states quite clearly that she is going to vote against the new standards because of evolution. She’s apparently not advocating actually teaching intelligent design, the Discovery Institute’s creationist Trojan horse. But she does think that students need to be exposed to “other theories” in some way.

"I agree completely that evolution should be taught with all of the research and study that has occurred. However, I believe it should not be taught to the exclusion of other theories of origin of life," Callaway told me.

[...]

Although she is not attempting to "arouse controversy," Callaway told me she is concerned about what’s best for children. "I want an informed public so that when these and other similar decisions are made that affect all of us that they are reflective of how the people feel."

As Florida Citizens for Science goes on to point out quite aptly, the other "theories," like intelligent design, have no scientific basis whatsoever. You can't rely on "faith" with one hand and argue that the same thing deserves to be consider "science." Moreover, evolution is not a theory. But the Christianists have to keep propagating that viewpoint in order to give legitimacy to their specious claims about creation and intelligent design. Hell, I'm surprised they haven't declared that gravity is a theory ... of course, some nutcase probably has.

The deplorable state of Florida's schools is embarrassing enough. But when crazed fundies like Callaway are given an opportunity to inflict their religious zealotry on our students in the guise of actual pedagogy, we are going too far.

Thanks, Jeb!, for making Florida a laughingstock in education.

The damaging legacy of Jeb! Bush, Vol. 1: The FCAT

Today I begin an occasional series at Blast Off! examining the damage done by Jeb! Bush during his eight years at the helm of America's fourth-largest state. Widely beloved by Floridians for some perverse reason, Jeb! nevertheless left office having burdened his "home" state with gifts like an untenable economy, a dysfunctional system of education (both K-12 and higher), and a shaky record in law enforcement and corrections, among many other bequests with varying degrees of destruction to our fair state.

I want to kick off this series, though, by taking a look at Jeb!'s systematic dismantling of a pretty fair educational system -- not the nation's best, by any means, but one that could hold its own before Jeb! got to work. Because of his undying devotion to vouchers and private indoctrination brainwashing education, Jeb! almost singlehandedly created a public school system that today ranks among the nation's worst. If he wanted to drown our public schools in a bathtub, to stretch an oft-cited neocon metaphor, he did a pretty passable job.

The pièce de résistance of his "A+" scheme (there's a misnomer if ever there was one) is Florida's Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT. This standardized test is offered to students from grades 3 to 11, and the results of the test not only determine whether a student is promoted and ultimately will graduate from high school, but they also affect a school's "grade" which, in turn, determines its state funding. Supporters of the FCAT claim that it makes the schools and teachers more accountable for what is being taught and helps prepare students better for a career or for higher education. Anyone with an ounce of common sense, though*, knows that nothing could be further from the truth, as teachers already have learned that they must "teach to the test" far more than they ever did before ... and, worse yet, not to their test but to some standardized, normative material that some distant "educators" believe the students ought to know.

Then, to exacerbate the situation, students' performance on the FCAT is compiled and tallied and each school given a letter grade (A to F) based solely on this criterion. If a school receives an "F" grade in two out of four years, students then are given "vouchers" to attend other public schools. (Such students formerly were permitted to transfer to private schools as well, but this was discontinued in 2006.)

Clearly, the FCAT is a travesty, and it always has been thus. But I have an even greater reason for this enmity towards the test.

Talking with my ex-wife yesterday, I learned that my 8-year-old son, known hereabouts as "Jr.," is going through serious anxiety attacks about school, and many of these revolve around the pressure he feels as a third-grader facing the FCAT for the first time. This is ludicrous. No third-grader should be focused on anything other than spelling, multiplication tables, and not being picked last for kickball. I'm being a little facetious here, but I'm righteously pissed off. I'm taking my son to a pediatric therapist today because he's worried about the FCAT. And he's brilliant -- I'm not just saying that because he's my son, but to make the point that he needn't be worried about the test at all. He's in the gifted program at school and ranked fifth of 1,000 students in his county on the gifted qualification test for the program. And he's worried about this absurd test, no doubt largely because of the emphasis Florida teachers must place on it in the classroom.

The FCAT is a detriment to learning. It's an artificial means of attempting objective review of a highly subjective process, and it needs to be eliminated. Now. Before it causes irreparable harm to Florida's reputation ... and to my son's psyche.

---

* Should anyone wish to attack me for not knowing what I'm talking about, I should note (at the risk of seeming immodest, but to establish my credentials on this topic) that I taught high school for four years (1987-91), prior to enrolling in law school, and I hold a master's degree in secondary education from Vanderbilt University. Suck. On. That, Jeb! fans.