From the Miami Herald
By Myriam Marquez, mmarquez@MiamiHerald.com
Money can’t buy you love, and maybe it can’t buy you happiness, but can it buy a top-notch education?
Ask the families sending their children to pricey private schools if they don’t think there’s value in what they’re spending to have their child in a prestigious place like Pine Crest School, with campuses in Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton, or Ransom Everglades School in Coconut Grove. Tuition and fees amount to $28,400 a year at Ransom.
That’s four-and-a-half times the average of what Florida and its counties spend on each student, about $6,300. And the amount has been dropping for several years, squeezing kids out of arts and music, physical education and foreign-language programs in many districts — not to mention the loss of civics even though such courses have been shown to contribute to a child’s ability to excel in math, science and reading and the critical thinking skills that life requires for success.
Granted, Florida, like much of the nation, has faced a tough economy with high unemployment and nettlesome foreclosures on properties that have lost their value — the very homes that local school districts count on for property tax revenue.
Even taking into account extra federal funds that go toward helping states teach students in living in high-poverty regions, the disabled or those learning a second language, Florida just scored a “D+” in revenue spent per student, ranking 39 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia.
But wait, it gets worse. That just-released study of rankings by Education Week used spending statistics from 2009 — before Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Legislature whacked $1.35 billion from public schools last year.
Are we dead last now?
No magic number
It’s true that there’s no magic number for funding that would lead to more students graduating high school, prepared to head to college or a tech school and a good-paying job. New York spends the most in the nation and its graduation rate is nothing special, but then New York, like Florida, has a high number of immigrants learning a new culture and language and pockets of generational poverty and the ills that go with broken homes.
And it’s true, too, that Catholic and other religious schools charge parents a lot less than a preparatory school like Pine Crest or Ransom and often spend less than what it costs to teach a public-school student, but those private schools get to select the kids they want.
Public schools, by contrast, take everybody. They’re the Big American Equalizer, the reason we have built a strong middle class.
But there is a breaking point to this public school formula for educational success, and Florida is standing at the precipice. Florida, never a big spender on education, has cut to the bone and is heading to the gristle. The past four years, education funding has been slashed by 12 percent.
The governor’s new-found love for education spending simply would restore $1 billion to public schools, which wouldn’t even cover last year’s bloodletting.
Still, Florida continues to get an “A” on standards and accountability in Education Week’s “Quality Counts” report, but the state fell from fifth in the nation in overall quality to No. 11. We’re slipping, and I’m not sure we can get up without a much bigger push from Tallahassee.
Meanwhile, the state is poised to increase FCAT standards again, which is all to the good. We shouldn’t settle. But prepare for lower rankings next year, at least at first as the bar rises, superintendents like Miami-Dade’s Alberto Carvalho are warning.
I’m not one of those parents who thinks the FCAT is a diabolical plot to dumb down kids with rote learning. If it’s done right — and national education leaders as well as state and local educators continue to praise the test’s merits to identify key weaknesses in each individual child’s knowledge — the FCAT and other high-quality tests like the National Assessment of Educational Progress help teachers target subject matter for a student to succeed.
People seem to forget that it was a Democrat, the late Gov. Lawton Chiles, who pushed the standards movement because public schools were graduating young adults who couldn’t cut it. Some couldn’t read and barely could understand math concepts. Former Gov. Jeb Bush pushed accountability, and it has been showing results, but let’s get real about the funding to reward what’s working. The Obama administration’s Race to the Top federal funding seeks to raise teacher quality, which has some union leaders queasy, but if they want to restore the teaching profession to its deserved glory, unions have to stop protecting those teachers (and they are a minority, to be sure) who don’t cut it.
High standards coupled with accountability for public schools is a given. Paying teachers what they’re worth, should be, too — if Florida is ever to become the economic powerhouse that the governor says it can be.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/14/2590326_p2/on-education-money-counts.html#storylink=cpy
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