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The evidence is overwhelming, but no one wants to admit that the state is falling short in education funding, including the governor, who denies the education budget has been cut.
By JON EAST, Times Perspective Editor
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 6, 2002
That Jeb Bush would turn to Franz Kafka to defend the crisis facing Florida public schools is, in a word commonly used to describe the writings of the late Czech author, surreal. But that's what the governor did recently in Bunnell, as teachers and parents there protested budgetary cuts by chanting "Give education a chance" outside the Flagler County Courthouse. Bush, asked to respond, told a reporter they were misinformed. Public schools are getting $12.1-billion this year, up from $11.8-billion last year.
"If that is a cut," said Bush, "I am living in a Kafka novel."
The Kafka remark was both telling and misleading. The novels that Kafka wrote were laced with anguish about bureaucracies and official doublespeak -- precisely the kind of budgetary denial in which the governor was engaged. Yes, the bottom line is larger, but so is the number of students who are entering the doors. So is the uncontrollable cost of inflation, in health benefits and utilities and supplies. The straight talk is that Florida increased its per-student allocation from $4,943 to $4,949 -- a 0.1 percent raise that is supposed to cover every inflationary cost, including salary increases, that schools face. When inflation is considered, public schools are getting less today than they did in 1990. Even before the last round of cuts, universities had dropped from $14,530 to $13,677 in per-student allocations in just the past two years.
In other words, the education budget has been cut.
The evidence is overwhelming. One need only look at what has happened since the December special legislative session, in which $639-million more was removed from education.
Hillsborough County has decided to eliminate summer school, promising to find other ways to help slow learners catch up. Pinellas already eliminated summer school for advanced studies, and has temporarily avoided worse consequences by digging $12.5-million from reserves and using longterm substitutes to fill teaching jobs. Miami-Dade, facing $81-million in cuts, is digging $7-million from reserves and asking all employees to take a three-day unpaid leave. Palm Beach tried to trim money from its popular academic magnet schools, and backed off when it was flooded with parent complaints. Volusia dropped its high schools back to six instructional periods, creating such turmoil that 20 students ended up being arrested for their protests. Polk County cut 160 jobs and all middle school sports. Sarasota and Manatee counties will ask voters in the spring if they will increase local taxes to make up the difference.
Sarasota school superintendent Wilma Hamilton described the plight this way: "This community did not hire me to dismantle the Sarasota County schools piece by piece. They hired me to sustain excellence. And the only way to do that in the state of Florida is to solve the financial problem locally."
Florida State University president Talbot "Sandy" D'Alemberte says: "We've just taken a very heavy hit. We've used all our reserves. If we have to go forward in the next budget year on a reduced budget, you are going to see very real pain. You're going to see layoffs and termination of programs and other kinds of cuts."
After the Palm Beach Post took a revealing look at education funding last month, Ken Pruitt, a conservative Port St. Lucie Republican and chairman of the Senate Finance and Taxation Committee, was prompted to remark: "We're on the slippery slope toward disaster. There are some difficult choices that are going to have to be made."
Welcome to the Kafkaesque nature of the education debate as the 2002 Florida Legislature convenes Jan. 22 in an annual session that begins less than seven weeks after the last special effort ended. Three years into an education plan that has centralized power in the governor's office, pushed standardized testing and awarded private vouchers, public schools and universities are now confronting a financial reality. Without more money, they will lose ground. The number of students in each classroom will increase. The quality of teaching will suffer, as capable graduates seek higher-paying opportunities in private business. Yet Bush, House Speaker Tom Feeney and a surprisingly large number of lawmakers seem eager to ignore this reality. They brush aside the national rankings: Florida is 43rd in pupil-teacher ratio, 38th in per-student spending, and 50th in per-capita spending on higher education. They all but sneer at the educators and parents who protest that schools need more. As the University of South Florida leases a local movie theater so it can cram more students into each class, some of the state's new education leaders say money is simply not an issue.
"It's annoying to me that we always spend our time talking about money, at least in the context of more money," says Phil Handy, a Winter Park financier and chairman of the newly appointed state Board of Education. "What we need to get used to and what we need to be able to accommodate is the fact that we're going to have to do with less, to do better with education and not have significantly new amounts of revenue. People like to characterize this as a revenue crisis. But it is really a spending crisis. It's not that we need more revenues. We need to do more with what we've got."
Handy's board, which oversees K-12, community colleges and universities, has become a visible symbol of the disconnection between policymakers and classroom teachers. It was created last year by the Legislature, and Bush appointed all its members, including Handy, a former campaign fund-raiser and politico who once led a fight against a statewide initiative called "Reclaim Education's Share." In its first six months, the board has kept itself so busy rewriting rules, devising "strategic plans," and defining its "seamless delivery system" that it has been either oblivious or hostile to the financial needs of education. After the Legislature cut $639-million from the budget in December, the board's staff praised lawmakers for "a responsible policy to show equity across K-20 education, to devolve decisions to local boards and districts and to protect classroom instruction." It even borrowed Bush's simplistic bottom-line analysis to note that "funding . . . continues to reflect an increase over the previous year."
Though Handy speaks of a "spending crisis," his own board initially approved a $400,000 salary package for its new secretary, former senator Jim Horne, with board member Charles Garcia arguing that: "I want our state to be known as the state that pays not the comparable salary, but the highest salary." Starting teacher pay, by contrast, ranks 34th in the nation.
What the Legislature faces is a sharp political division that cannot possibly help public education in the long run. In the coming session, lawmakers will be told to give more decisionmaking authority to universities and to school boards and to hold them accountable, all of which is appropriate. They will see that the grading formula for public schools, an evaluation system on which vouchers and bonuses are awarded, has been changed yet again. They will hear how the new Education Board will finally replace the elected education commissioner and the state Cabinet. But while Bush and the education board continue to talk about governance and testing, real pressures are mounting in the classroom.
Enrollment in public schools jumped from 1.9-million to 2.4-million over the past decade, and is expected to climb to 2.8-million in the next decade. The type of student is also changing. In the past decade, the percentage of students who live in poverty has increased from 34 to 43.6 percent and the percentage of those with special educational needs has increased from 15.3 to 19.3 percent. Today, one in every 13 students who enter public schools is unable to speak English. At the same time, teachers are leaving the profession. A third quit by the end of their fifth year on the job, and the overall level of experience is declining. In most districts, the least experienced teachers are the ones assigned to the most challenging students. The Legislature's office of Economic and Demographic Research has projected that the state will need to find 160,000 new teachers over the next decade, yet the salaries for Florida teachers are below both the national average and those of neighboring states, including Georgia and Alabama.
The truth is that the stress fractures in the classroom won't be mended solely by new tests or higher standards. They will take a commitment to excellence that recognizes money is part of the equation. In the past three years, the governor and Legislature have been able to boost education with proceeds from the state's tobacco settlement and from soaring stock investments that lowered the state contribution to pensions. But the markets have changed and so has the economy.
The bills are coming due, and the December special session was only a glimpse of what is ahead.
"Public schools across our state are reacting to these cuts by freezing teacher hiring, stopping textbook and computer purchases, and considering the elimination of classes," says House Democratic Leader Lois Frankel, who is also a candidate for governor. "This is not the way to build a 21st century school system necessary to prepare a work force that can develop the diverse vibrant economy that Florida needs."
Frankel is not alone in her thinking. The Florida Chamber of Commerce has issued a report noting the decline in financial support for education. "Florida must compete on the basis of its intellectual infrastructure," says Joseph Richardson, a former utility executive who helped draft the report. "We're not where we need to be, especially in the education area." Educators and families across the state also have begun to take notice, and are writing letters and staging protests.
In Volusia County, when the School Board there responded to the budgetary cutbacks by eliminating one instructional period each day in high school, some of the students were so outraged they began staging protests. Charges ultimately were dropped against 20 students who were arrested at Pine Ridge High School, but the emotions are still running high. Shannon Tinsley, a 16-year-old junior at Spruce Creek High, told the Orlando Sentinel that she could not understand the priorities.
"We can afford to build the Bill France overpass," said Tinsley. "We can afford to build a new courthouse in DeLand. Why can't we afford to educate our children?"
Policymakers in the capital would be quick to tell Miss Tinsley that she is misinformed, that overpasses and courthouses are built with capital outlay funding that is derived from gas taxes and property taxes and is dedicated for purposes other than education. But, then, those answers are also doublespeak. What she is asking is a question that gets to the heart of the matter, and that North Carolina, when faced with the same budgetary dilemma this past year, answered differently. North Carolina lawmakers, when faced with a $750-million deficit, said education was too important, and raised taxes to get the job done.
In Florida, which ranks 50th in spending on higher education, some lawmakers are heading into the 2002 session trying to pretend that money is not part of the problem. Phil Handy, Bush's chairman of the Board of Education, even gets annoyed at the mention of the word. But Shannon Tinsley asked the right question: Why can't we afford to educate our children?
-- Jon East is the Perspective editor for the Times.