A Times Editorial

Now Bush faces a test

A number of Florida's public schools have tested out of their F status, but Gov. Jeb Bush's next step should be to measure students' progress.

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 22, 2000

Seventy-eight public schools that Florida deemed as failures last year have now made the grade, and Gov. Jeb Bush is entitled to some sense of satisfaction. In fact, Floridians on all sides of the polarizing debate over our public schools should be able to take unreserved satisfaction in the evident improvement made by so many at-risk students. The writing test they passed is a better measure of student performance than most standardized tests. It calls on students to write a cohesive, organized, grammatical essay under the pressure of a deadline.

"So the system works," Bush said Monday. "The threat of the opportunity scholarships, I think, refocused school districts."

Clearly, the threat of stigmatization and vouchers has created new motivation in public schools, but the governor should be careful not to overstate his case. Students at 78 schools scored substantially better this year on a writing test than they did last year. That's progress, but it doesn't necessarily affirm the wisdom or long-term viability of Bush's A+

Education Plan. In fact, in the short-term, it tends to put the governor on the spot.

Bush's voucher plan was sold to the Legislature and to the public as a way to spur improvement in public schools, but his early tactics and his previous support for widespread vouchers caused people to question his motivations. He pushed the bill through his first session as governor, spurning the advice of educators and twisting Republican arms. He acknowledged that his grading system was flawed, but he put it in place anyway. He also applied the grading standards retroactively to schools, assigning Fs and issuing voucher checks before schools even knew what goals were being established for their performance.

Now, Bush is faced with precisely the result he said he was seeking. Dozens of public schools have lifted themselves out of failure as Bush defines it, making vouchers unnecessary for their students. But not everyone is pleased. Randy Lewis, spokesperson for Floridians for School Choice, said Monday that the state should now consider whether to offer vouchers to students at schools that are graded C or D. And both Bush and Education Commissioner Tom Gallagher said they would consider ratcheting up the test standards required for schools to avoid an F. Standards should be raised gradually, but the motivation should be to encourage continued student improvement, not to create a pretext for vouchers.

The system by which schools are graded clearly needs work. It is biased too much toward performance on a handful of standardized tests and ignores some students, such as 11th and 12th graders, altogether. More importantly, it makes no real attempt to measure the standard the governor himself established: that students gain a year's worth of knowledge in a year's time. The Bush administration has begun to move in that direction by administering the standardized test every year, but the next step is crucial. The state needs to use annual test results to measure progress, or lack of it, which will help establish whether the students are being properly taught.

Now that Florida won't be handing out any new vouchers this fall, we all get to see whether the governor was sincere about his motive. Is the point to produce better schools or more vouchers?

The students passed their test this year. Now the governor faces his own.

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