Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

For a better Florida

Stakes are high for education tests

Challenges to vouchers, school funding formulas and other issues could affect the governor's legacy.

By JON EAST
Published March 5, 2006

In seven years of experimenting with what he calls his "laboratory of education reform," Gov. Jeb Bush has seen two beakers explode in his face. The state's highest court rejected his private-school vouchers as unconstitutional, and voters rejected his plea to leave overcrowded classrooms alone. Bush, not known for cheerful acquiescence, is calling for retakes on these lab tests.

His opponents will happily make them high stakes.

"Maybe the governor will honor his oath of office and will "support, protect and defend' the state Constitution," says Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association, which was a plaintiff in the voucher lawsuit filed in 1999. "But more likely, we'll see further shenanigans in an attempt to make vouchers legal. . . . Just look at what has happened in other states. People won't buy it."

"Listen, you can't have a more formidable political adversary in Florida than Jeb Bush," says Damien Filer, who helped direct the class-size reduction campaign in 2002. "But there's a reason he failed the first time on the ballot, and there's a reason he has failed so far to get it back on the ballot. People know that smaller classes help their children, and it's going to be a challenge to trick them into undoing it."

Bush made vouchers his highest priority in his first legislative session as governor, in 1999. The program he created, called Opportunity Scholarships, was sold as a way to give students in failing public schools a private alternative. The state would determine, through standardized test scores, which schools were chronic failures and then offer vouchers to any interested students in those schools.

From the start, the vouchers were under a constitutional cloud. The day after Bush signed them into law, in June 1999, a suit was filed. Within nine months, a trial judge had ruled against them. Later, a district appeals court rejected them. In January, the Florida Supreme Court ordered the program to be stopped, saying the vouchers violate the constitutional requirement for "a uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality system of free public schools."

While the case worked slowly through the courts, Bush and the Legislature were busy expanding vouchers. Opportunity Scholarships are now the smallest of five different plans. Of the roughly 33,000 students who have been offered vouchers in the past three years to leave schools judged as failing, only 733 students now receive them. By comparison, roughly 110,000 other students now attend private schools at public expense. None of those vouchers depends on the poor performance of an assigned public school.

Those other vouchers have created a political backdrop for the fight that lies ahead. The court wrote that prekindergarten vouchers, which serve nearly 80,000 4-year-olds this year, are not affected by the ruling. But a Senate analysis suggests that the McKay Scholarship, which pays for 16,144 disabled students, could be susceptible to challenge.

Some legislators, including Sen. Dan Webster, R-Winter Garden, think the fix is as simple as changing how the checks are written. He would fold Opportunity Scholarships into the existing Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship, which serves 13,497 students from poor families. Under the corporate voucher, the state gives a dollar-for-dollar tax credit to businesses that contribute. The money is handed to nonprofit organizations approved by the state Department of Education. The Legislature sets a limit on the credits - $88-million this year - and establishes student eligibility and the amount of each individual voucher. The money, though, never actually reaches the state's bank account.

Whether the court would see such a plan as a constitutional ruse is a separate question from whether it is advisable. Some of the worst voucher abuses have been reported in the corporate program, including an Ocala businessman who walked off with $268,000 without ever awarding a single voucher to a single student. A 2003 Senate report blasted the program, saying "the record is clear that there is very little or no state oversight." Tampa businessman John Kirtley, whose nonprofit group now controls almost all corporate vouchers statewide, has brought more integrity and accountability to the process. But his group operates essentially as a shadow DOE, distancing the state from the dollars it is investing and the students it is serving.

Patrick Heffernan, who once ran a corporate voucher organization and leads Floridians for School Choice, says blending the two is a bad idea. "In a nutshell, I don't think it's workable," Heffernan says. "There's an uncertainty to the dollars in that program, and that's not fair to the families. . . . It transfers to the public relations departments of corporations decisions that should be made in the public forum of the Legislature."

Heffernan and Kirtley do agree on one approach. They think voters should be asked this fall to change the state Constitution to allow school vouchers. Says Kirtley: "As someone who works to give low-income parents choices, I don't see how voters could possibly disagree with giving families choices."

Both legislative chambers are working to produce a ballot question, but neither is clear on how to write it. The 1st District Court of Appeal ruled that vouchers violate a religious-separation clause, one that forbids the state from giving money "directly or indirectly" to religious institutions. But the state Supreme Court didn't speak to the religious issue, instead finding that vouchers violate the "public schools" language. Does that mean voters should be asked to change both parts? Would an amendment allow vouchers to any student for any purpose?

In the public arena, vouchers have not fared well. A Gallup poll last year found that opposition nationally has grown from 50 to 57 percent since 1998. In the past three decades, most voucher-related initiatives in other states have failed.

In Florida, a campaign might also produce debate about the glaring lack of accountability for vouchers. Gov. Bush, in a recent speech defending high-stakes testing, said that: "If we don't measure the things that are important, it really is a statement that we don't care. . . . And so we measure the bejesus out of everything."

That's true of public schools. But most voucher schools aren't required to test their students. Most of the students never take the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, and the results of the few who do are not tabulated. So a campaign to convince voters that vouchers are necessary would have to acknowledge that no one knows whether students on vouchers are learning. Florida may test the "bejesus" out of public school students, but, for those on vouchers, it looks the other way.

Bush didn't say the sky would fall if voters tried to reduce the size of overcrowded classrooms, but he did look upward. Paying for smaller classes, he said repeatedly in 2002, would financially "block out the sun."

The problem for Bush, in trying to get voters to change their minds, is that per-student spending increases have not significantly changed in the four years since, and Florida still ranks 48th in the nation. Rather than raise the sales tax by 2 or 3 cents, as his former education commissioner warned would be needed, the governor instead claims to have cut taxes by $14.8-billion.

So the governor faces a tall order if he wants to convince voters that smaller classes will bankrupt the state. That's where the sweetener comes in. Last year, Bush offered higher starting teacher salaries in return for a partial repeal of the class size amendment. His math never added up, and his idea was dismissed. This year, some lawmakers, including Senate President-designate Ken Pruitt, are looking at a different combination. They want to combine partial class size repeal with a national movement that has decided 65 cents of every education dollar must be spent in classrooms. They say the formula, applied to Florida, would redirect $1-billion into the classroom.

Here's how a House report characterizes the deal:

"Any legislation or constitutional amendment that would better focus education spending in such a way should provide a better solution to Florida's educational needs than a rigid and unwieldly class size reduction effort or any other wide-ranging, expensive initiative that ultimately fails to elevate student performance."

The duplicity may not be lost on voters. The 65 percent requirement is the same kind of rigid mandate that class size opponents argue has no place in the state Constitution. If the formula makes sense as a matter of education policy, then lawmakers need only pass a law requiring it.

First Class Education, the group pushing the "65 Percent Solution," is led by Overstock.com president Patrick Byrne, and its objectives are decidedly partisan. Tim Mooney, the Arizona-based political consultant who serves as spokesman, has circulated a memorandum that touts the "political benefits." Among them is the "splitting of the education union" and "the use of unlimited nonpersonal money for political positioning advantages" for Republicans. "Every day and every dollar the education establishment uses to defeat this proposal," he wrote, "is a day and a dollar they cannot spend on other political activities."

Pairing the 65 percent solution with class size may lure campaign donations from Byrne, but it is far from a comfortable fit. Republican lawmakers who have pushed for reforms in the constitutional initiative process can't well argue that a funding formula belongs in the document or that an amendment with two distinctly different subjects is fair play. Bush has long argued that the state's role should be limited to setting educational goals, which he calls outputs, as opposed to focusing too much on money, which he calls inputs.

Then there is the problem with research. Bush argues, with some basis, that research is unclear on the impacts of smaller class sizes in middle and high schools. Yet there is no research to support the contention that dividing school funds into 65 and 35 percent portions helps students learn. The definition used by Byrne's group, in fact, is so strained that it counts guidance counselors, media specialists, special education assistants and reading advisers as though they are district headquarters bureaucrats.

"Class size is all about getting more money to classrooms," says Filer, "And they don't want to put the public dollars behind it. That's why they offer the 65 percent solution. You don't have to spend a single extra dollar on public education to achieve it."

Vouchers and class size trace back to Bush's first days in office. In his 1999 State of the State address, he asked uneasy lawmakers to move ahead with sweeping education reform. He said "that no student in our state should be forced to attend a school that repeatedly continues to fail," and, surprisingly, referred to class size reduction as one of the "good ideas being considered by this Legislature." His vouchers are now in jeopardy because of the court, and the "good" idea of smaller classes is apparently too good for his tastes.

If lawmakers give Bush the chance to take his campaign to voters, the amendments will attract national attention and money from interest groups on both sides. Win or lose, they could also shape the education agenda not for Bush but for his successors.

[Last modified March 3, 2006, 19:23:02]