Imagine for a moment that you went to the grocery store to buy a loaf of bread.
But when you got there, the store manager said the only way you could buy bread would be for you to also buy a gallon of milk, 10 packs of adult diapers, a box of Popsicles, some day-old pastries, a 5-pound pork butt, three gallons of orange juice, a tin of anchovies and a fistful of lottery tickets.
That would sound like a scam, right?
Well, welcome to the way the Florida Legislature handled public education this year — legislation by scam.
A cram-scam, in fact.
Instead of carefully considering education proposals one at a time, Republican leaders went behind closed doors to cram 35 different proposals — rules on everything from sunscreen use to charter-schools incentives — into a single, 278-page, take-it-or-leave-it bill unveiled at the last minute.
For me to simply reprint the bill, it would take 75 columns this size … and you still wouldn’t get to the part where legislators want to siphon money away from traditional schools until column No. 46.
So, realizing you can’t possibly understand everything they did, legislators are trying to highlight little pieces that sound good … if you don’t know all the facts.
Take, for instance, the “schools of hope” program (explained in lines 5,060 through 5,463 of the bill). This seeks to use tax dollars to create more charter schools, specifically in neighborhoods where traditional schools have failed.
Sounds swell, right? I mean, who wants failing schools?
Well, here’s what they aren’t telling you: Charter schools often fail at a higher rate than traditional schools in Florida.
In Osceola County, for example, there are only two F-rated schools. Both are charters.
In Orange County, charter schools fail at a rate more than three times higher than traditional schools.
So this bill takes a method of education that is failing at rates much higher than traditional ones — and puts it on steroids.
There are your anchovies.
It also exempts charter schools from some zoning laws and does away with proposed measures to ensure for-profit operators don’t pocket too many tax dollars.
There’s your day-old pastries.
So who thinks this idea is a swell one? Take a wild guess. Charter schools are so stoked, some are basically bribing their parents to lobby for its passage.
The Miami Herald recently reported that two charter schools in South Florida are offering to give parents “five hours credit toward their ‘encouraged’ volunteer hours at the school, so long as they wrote a letter or otherwise urged Gov. Rick Scott to sign HB 7069.”
Quite a civics lesson for those kids.
Now, some charter schools do great things. In fact, I have made a point through the years of highlighting the charter schools that do a good job, particularly those that cater to special-needs and gifted students.
But to try to portray charter schools as some sort of automatic salvation to “failing” public schools is bogus.
Other parts of this bill are a mixed bag of good, bad and simply political.
It mandates recess for elementary schools, one less end-of-course test (for algebra 2), more vouchers for special-needs students, new rules for students with autism and an expansion of the dunderheaded “Best and Brightest” teacher-bonus program — which pays teachers, in part, based on the test scores that the teachers themselves posted back when they were in high school.
I might even go so far as to say there is more good than bad in this bill. But with nearly three dozen moving parts, it took legislative analysts 76 pages just to try to explain it to legislators … who, I guarantee you, didn’t read it all anyway.
Overall, it’s just too much — which is why Florida superintendents have asked the governor to veto the bill and part of why State Sen. David Simmons, a leader on education issues, was one of the few Republicans to vote against it.
The bottom line is that this was another cruddy session for education in a state that treats public schools more like a pain than a priority.
Funding is way below most other states. (And not hoity-toity states either. We trail places like Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia.) And teachers are fleeing.
So, to mask all of that, legislators crammed a zillion things into a single bill to A) help the bad stuff pass; and B) give legislators a way to later claim: Well, I didn’t really like that stinky part either. But it was an all-or-nothing deal.
If these folks had integrity and courage, they would take these issues up one at a time, make the case for each and then put their names and votes next to each one for voters back home to see.
Instead, they threw all this unrelated mess into one jumbled shopping cart … and hope you’ll only pay attention to that one, fluffy loaf of bread.
smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com
