Don't beleive the hype about Florida's eductaion budget!

I am reminded of the words “Don’t believe the Hype” when it comes to the victory lap that Rick Scott and the republicans are doing when it comes to education funding. They say that this year we are spending 18.9 billion dollars on education and the most we had ever spent before is 18.75 (in 2007) billion dollars and where true it only tells a fraction of the story.

Today we have 67,000 more students and per pupil spending has dropped 199 dollars. Furthermore Scott and the legislature must have never heard of inflation as according to the Lakeland Ledger the value of 2007’s budget would be 21.44 billion in 2014 dollars.     

Then factor in senate bill 736 which requires entirely new pay scales based on next year’s standardized tests, tests we don’t have by the way, all the costs for Common Core and the staggering amount of unfunded mandates and districts aren’t just doing more with less, they are doing a lot more with a crippling amount of less. The only people who could possibly be happy about this budget our charter school operators and private schools that take vouchers because they have seen their piece of the pie grow exponentially while public schools are starved.

If you are okay with the governor and legislature starving our schools then this is the group for you. If you think we should and can do better then its time you started demanding it.  I believe the governor should call a special session to adequately fund our schools and hopefully you do too.