“Florida’s public schools are not just another competitor in the education marketplace. They are THE CONSTITUTIONAL FOUNDATION OF FLORIDA’S EDUCATION SYSTEM, A PUBLIC TRUST AND THE ONLY EDUCATION SYSTEM THE CONSTITUTION REQUIRES THE STATE TO PROVIDE. Florida may choose to fund educational alternatives, but it cannot neglect its constitutional obligation to public schools.”
Crystal Etienne, President of EDUVOTER Action Network  from an editorial in the Tallahassee Democrat

OUR CHILDREN ARE OUR FUTURE

Our children are our greatest legacy. Education is one of the most important things we can provide them—and protecting that education system is something that affects every one of us.

The deliberate and systematic destruction of public education in Florida began a long time ago.   Betsy DeVos, the former U.S. Secretary of Education (2017 -2021), stated in 2018 that Florida’s educational system was a model for the nation. For Floridians, politics and education have been intertwined since former governor Jeb Bush introduced the A+ Plan for reforming education in 1998. The reform was based on a conviction that competition would provide dramatic improvements in educational achievement with little new money. It did not happen.

The tax credit scholarship program enacted in 2001 was the alternative approach to funding private schools. By allowing corporations to donate owed taxes for tuition, the state bypassed the constitutional provision against using public funds for private schools. A lawsuit against the Florida Tax Credit (FTC) scholarships was dismissed by the Florida Supreme Court in 2017. Donations of taxes were not considered to be public funds because they never reached the State treasury. According to Politico, in 2016 Betsy DeVos contributed one million dollars through her foundation to send thousands of children to Tallahassee for a rally against the FTC scholarship lawsuit.

FTC scholarships are funded from corporate tax rebates up to a designated funding cap. If enrollment exceeds 90% of the funding cap, the cap is raised the following year. Funding sources from corporations were expanded to include credits against the insurance premium tax, severance taxes on oil and gas production, sales tax liabilities of direct pay permit holders, and alcoholic beverages taxes. The largest corporate donors to the FTC scholarships are the beverage industry and United Health Care. When corporations, not taxpayers, fund schools, THEY CALL THE SHOTS. They are not funding our schools out of a sense of public or civic responsibility. They are choosing to fund schools who are aligned with the goals of the corporations, ensuring that young people grow into adults who do not question the system and who it actually works for.

In 2018, a sales tax ‘donation’ bill was passed to fund the Hope Scholarships to private schools for students with claims of being bullied. New lawsuits may be filed over the expansion of funding through ‘donations’ from new car purchases. The car dealer must inform customers of this option. Anecdotal comments about how this information is provided range from continuous reminders to simply including a consent form for signature with the purchase documents with no comment.

Private schools are exempt from state curriculum standards and state assessments. They are not required to have certified teachers. They are not even required to provide services for students with disabilities, which is a stated purpose of the scholarships. The curriculum varies from religious to secular but there is no oversight of the materials used in these classrooms. Most of these schools are never audited. One-third of the students return to public schools within a year. The returning students are further behind than they were before they transferred to an FTC school . YET THESE SCHOOLS TAKE NEARLY ONE BILLION DOLLARS FROM PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

With large numbers of students enrolled in an unstable charter sector combined with growing voucher programs, Florida is poised to be the first state in which public education collapses.

[This content was excerpted from “Twenty Years Later: The Jeb Bush A+ Plan Fails Florida’s Students” report]

We must act to protect public schools.

LCI recently hosted a fantastic School Choice Forum featuring a school-choice expert, school board members, local candidates, a teacher, and Gwen Graham. We followed up by presenting the same information at our July Leon County Indivisible monthly meeting.

This month, we are kicking off the Save Our Schools initiative at our monthly meeting. The program will include Sally Butzine, the foundation expert for school choice; Scott Mazur, Leon County Teachers Association President; Jordon Scott, the president of the Big Bend chapter of the Florida AFL-CIO and co editor of the Authoritarian U and others, including teachers from private schools.

We will be partnering with other organizations, including EDUVOTER, to address the growing challenges facing our public schools.

THIS ISSUE IS CRITICAL!

WE NEED YOUR HELP! It is time to roll up our sleeves and develop a meaningful ACTION PLAN to undo the damage that has already been done to our public school and prevent further harm, degradation, and possible collapse of our educational system..

ISSUES AND CONCERNS:

• Vouchers: How are they being used—and potentially abused? What can we do about it? AUDIT OF DOE and Funding Accountabiltiy Challenges
• Florida Department of Education: How do we effectively put pressure on the DOE to address these concerns?
• Teacher Pay: Florida teachers remain among the lowest-paid in the nation. How do we change that?
• Performance Standards: Most parents agree that high stakes testing does not work. Teachers are forced to ‘teach the test’. Kids are stressed out by all the testing. How do we set performance metrics for schools and students that are transparent and fair without unduly burdening our already overburdened teachers?
• Limits on “Parental Choice”: Vaccine opt-outs are rising because Florida has some of the broadest opt-out options in the country. As a result, about 88% of Florida kindergarteners are fully vaccinated, well below the 95% threshold typically needed for herd immunity. In some counties, vaccination rates have dropped below 80%, raising concerns about potential outbreaks and making schools less safe for everyone. What are the limits of allowing parents to dictate individualized policies that affect the entire population of the school their child attends. Are some parents preferences more important than others?
• Curriculum: Book bans are the highly visible face of the curriculum wars but there are many other battles raging as well. Many Florida schools are using PragerU curriculum to teach an alternative history in which white people are centered and slavery is defended. Whose agenda is defining curriculum choices for our classrooms?
• AI in the Classroom: AI is already in our classrooms. You have likely not heard much about it but it is “teaching” your first-grader to read. Replacing human teachers with machines is another ploy to cut funding to public schools. We need to ensure that all parents know how AI is being used now and what the plans are for future use.
• Teacher recruitment: How do we attract and retain qualified teachers in our public schools? And how do the qualifications and certifications required of public-school teachers compare with those required by private schools participating in the voucher program?
• Elections & legislation: We need to understand how elections, legislation, and policy decisions directly affect our public schools.
• Accountability for private schools: Private schools receiving taxpayer dollars should be accountable for the money they receive and for the education they claim to provide. Where there is documented abuse or fraud, we need to expose it and demand accountability.