Legislative power is abused in state school programs

By MATIN DYCKMAN

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 6, 2000

TALLAHASSEE -- Though Gov. Jeb Bush cut $313-million in so-called turkeys from Florida's new budget, some choice ones escaped the ax. They include a curious $6.5-million subsidy for two out-of-state firms that promise to work wonders for problem readers in public schools and juvenile prisons, and which are now hawking school boards to apply for the money.

Some educators doubt the claims. Others are more impressed. A larger issue, however, is the abuse of legislative power to decide not just what should be taught in Florida's schools, but how.

Another is to what extent influential lobbying played a part. Van Poole, a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party, lobbied for one of the companies, which is headed by a former Republican national chairman, William E. Brock, also a former senator and Reagan-era Cabinet member. The other company was represented by the fast-rising firm of Paul Bradshaw, whose wife is the governor's chief of staff, and David Rancourt, the governor's former deputy chief of staff.

The subsidy, part of a $17.5-million appropriation for low-performing schools, should have been prime veto bait. The Department of Education hadn't requested it. Neither had the governor. Education Commissioner Tom Gallagher lobbied behind the scenes so that school boards might spend the money as they saw fit.

But the earmarking was a pet project of the chairman of the House budget subcommittee on education, Rep. Steven Wise, R-Jacksonville.

Someone, if not Wise himself, also saw to it that the wording of the bill would not make it obvious to a casual reader that the $6.5-million was intended for two particular vendors. It did this by referring to "a failure free reading program which is an Education Commission of the States promising practice. . ." and by requiring that all grants include a "bridges component which is a comprehensive assessment of cognitive, processing and perceptual skills. . ."

In fact, Bridges is a proprietary product offered only by Brock's company, Intellectual Development Systems Inc., of Annapolis, MD. Failure Free is the property and name of a concern in Concord, NC. The words should have been capitalized, as they were in the original draft of the House's appropriations bill.

The omission occurred after some educators, legislators and journalists began criticizing the strings, which reserved an even larger sum, $7.25-million, for school boards to teach reading to elementary students according to the "Direct Instruction Curriculum developed at the University of Oregon." There appears to be only one company, based in DeSoto, Texas, that markets these materials.

Jan Mickler, Pinellas County's supervisor of secondary reading and language arts, objects to the exclusion of other programs and products she believes would work as well or better.Failure Free, she says, is overly structured, leaving no role for a teacher's judgment. Direct Instruction is exclusively phonics. Bridges comprises primarily physical exercises, such as balance boards, wall charts and trampolines, that are described as preparing children to learn to read. But, says Mickler, "At no time during any of the (Bridges) lessons do students ever read or write. . . "

Pinellas hasn't decided whether to indulge in or decline Wise's pet projects. But to get either Bridges or Failure Free, it would have to apply for and use both.

Wise's office said he was on vacation and out of touch when I called last week to ask about this. However, his aide, Dee Alexander, said she thought "both programs are designed to work hand in hand, based on the demonstrations that were done."

But Mickler says they are not, and a spokesman for Bridges, Jim Kitterman, the company's vice president for operations, essentially confirmed this when I asked if he knew why Wise had linked them. He said he didn't.

"After that was done," he said, "the two companies made the best of it and tried to find a way to make it an effective operation at the school level, so we combined our programs and created a model that would make it work with the same staff, the same space and the same school population."

Failure Free and Direct Instruction, but not Bridges, are on the "promising practices" list maintained by the Education Commission of the States, an information clearinghouse where Wise represents the Florida House of Representatives. But the Commission's report on Failure Free comes with a noteworthy caveat: "Most of the studies were conducted by the developer, and some do not include comparison or control groups." The developer, the report adds, "plans to conduct a large-scale, longitudinal, independent evaluation of the effects of Failure Free Reading."

That, too, it appears, may be a gift from Wise. His proviso requires Florida school boards to use some of their grant money to support an "independent" evaluation of the programs.

Wise is leaving the House because of term limits. Someone else will inherit the power he abused, and will almost surely abuse it, too.

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