Vitti gives control of the district to a bunch of rich white guys (and one girl).

Have you ever heard the saying, the cure is worse than the disease? Well if you know what it means welcome to Duval County’s education system.

The Quality Education for All initiative has come to town and superintendent Vitti has promptly given control of our schools to them. A bunch of millionaires, make that white millionaires, some of whom don’t even live in Jacksonville, who sent their children to private schools; millionaires with nary any actually education experience. Will now be making decisions that effect tens of thousand of poor mostly black kids that live in the North and West sides of town. 

I know what some of you are thinking. We (our schools) have problems; they have money lets get together. If only it were that easy because the problem is they want control.

The Quality Education for all Initiative has a board of directors that will decide how the money is spent.  It consists of chairman -Wayne Weaver; Members - Cindy Edelman; Gary Chartrand; Laurie DuBow; Matt Rapp; David Stein; Non-voting Members - Dr. Nikolai Vitti, Superintendent of Duval County Public Schools; Nina Waters, President of The Community Foundation for Northeast Florida. 

*Wayne Weaver, womens shoes, wife on the board of the JPEF

*Gary Chartrand, grocer, also on the board of city year and the JPEF

*Lawerence “Laurie” DuBow, pharmacutical sales and marketing,

*Cindy Edelman, also on the board of City Year and JPEF, art history teacher at Bolles

Matt Rapp, golfer

*David Stein, restaurateur

• gave money to Ashley Smith-Juarez’s election campaign, if you noticed a lot of overlap there then you aren’t the only one.

The QEA funds are housed at the Community Foundation and the money is managed by the Jacksonville Public Education Fund.

But the board that decides how the money is spent has three board members on the JPEF if you count Wayne Weaver whose wife is on it along with Chartrnd and Edelman. What am I missing? Why is the Community Foundation involved at all.

These are the people who will be allowed to vote on how the money is spent. Did you notice a painful lack of teaching experience there and don’t me started about Edelman? Did you see the lack of institutional knowledge? Could they even find the north or west sides of town, how about at least a token black guy. I highly doubt they have any relevant knowledge and it is obvious that they have no experience about the problems on that side of town. But worst of all they are in charge when it should be the other way around where Vitti gets to vote and they get to advise.

Lets look at some of the things they have already voted on.

Teach for America, just what our poor back kids need, untrained tourists that create a revolving door of teachers, oh and they take jobs that professional teachers might take.

The New Teacher Project, it’s their mantra that if you can just cut away enough bad teachers then things will all be better. They are here to examine our “human capital”, gee I wonder what they will find.

The Columbia Summer Principal Academy where teachers can get free masters degrees, what could my problem here be? Well of the five slots filled so far, four of them were by TFA hobbyists. Hey come serve two years and we’ll give you a free masters degree, make it a career and you can, rhymes with duck fit.   

Then they voted to throw money at the problem through a transfer initiative that all relevant research says will produce some success on the elementary level, none on the secondary and then peter out when the money runs out.

There strategy is to basically blame professionally teachers and to throw money at the problem and Vitti has given them his thumbs up.

I think it is great they want to be involved, we need more people to be, but at the end of the day they have zero business making education decisions because after all people not knowing what they were doing got us in this mess in the first place.