Florida lawmakers are playing a cynical game by marking almost the entire 7.1 percent increase in public school spending for class size reduction.
Published May 2, 2004
Nearly two decades ago, Florida voters thought they had found a way to give more money to public schools. But the lottery turned out to be a shell game. Its proceeds were used not to enhance education, as had been promised, but merely to allow lawmakers to hand out tax breaks in their place.
Two years ago, voters tried something different. This time they insisted that schools quit stuffing so many children into each classroom, and they wrote into the Constitution that "payment of the costs associated with reducing class size to meet these requirements is the responsibility of the state."
Guess what game lawmakers are playing again. The 7.1 percent increase in public school spending the Legislature has adopted for the coming year is marked with a lottery-like asterisk. Almost all that money is aimed at reducing class sizes and paying for 55,000 new students. That leaves only a 1 percent increase for everything else, which doesn't keep pace with inflation and is likely to leave most teachers without pay raises.
Few lawmakers are showing remorse, and Education Commissioner Jim Horne is pointing the finger of blame at voters. "Why is everyone shocked?" Horne asks. "Why is everyone walking around and saying this (class size reduction) is expensive? We couldn't have made it more clear."
Only the most cynical politician would argue that voters were insisting that class sizes be reduced at the expense of teacher pay raises or classroom curriculum or books and computers, but so far that is the way Gov. Jeb Bush and the Legislature have responded. As evidence, just look at the education budgets prior to the class size amendment. Five times in the previous decade, the public schools budget increased more than 7 percent, which generally has been necessary to keep up with increasing enrollment and inflation. So how does a 7.1 percent increase also reduce class sizes? Didn't voters intend for small classes to be an enhancement?
School classroom sizes don't belong in the state Constitution, but lawmakers who think they can persuade voters to remove the requirement are missing the underlying message. Parents are tired of kindergarten classes with 30 students and fed up with the cut-rate approach to public education. Florida ranks 49th in per capita education spending and has the largest schools and the sixth largest classrooms in the nation. Bush himself has argued that smaller class sizes will help children in the primary grades, and his lieutenant governor, Toni Jennings, led a task force that argues prekindergarten classes should have no more than 10 students per teaching adult.
So there is some agreement that smaller class sizes, at least in the early grades, promote learning. But the problem is that the governor and Legislature want higher quality only if it costs nothing more. Two years ago, Horne told voters that class size reduction would require the sales tax to be raised by as much as 2 cents. Yet, now that the amendment is in effect, neither he nor the governor has asked the Legislature to do so. Instead, Bush keeps pushing for tax cuts. In his first five years, the governor claims to have reduced taxes by $8.2-billion, which is 17 times the amount devoted in the current year's budget for class size reduction.
Instead of tax hikes, then, lawmakers have responded with tax breaks.
The state's new prekindergarten program provides yet another glimpse at the Legislature's miserly education approach. Voters mandated, through a separate constitutional amendment, prekindergarten for all 4-year-olds in Florida. In this case, though, the governor and legislative leaders broadly supported the initiative and Horne argued that "this investment should save the state millions of dollars." As the bills get ready to come due next year, though, lawmakers are trying to shortchange prekindergarten by setting up standards that could make it barely distinguishable from babysitting.
Some things that are worth doing cost money, and reducing class sizes, at least in the early grades, is one of them. So when lawmakers blame voters for robbing teachers of pay raises this coming year, they are engaging in the same kind of insulting budgetary gamesmanship that reminds voters of the failed lottery promise. Surely this is not the legacy this Legislature wants to leave.
