Jeb Bush's business partner gets 12 years in prison.

The same Jeb Bush whose family, friends and supporters have benefitted financially from his so called education reforms may have some explaining to do about his business dealings with Miami businessman Claudio Osorio who was sentenced to 12 years in prison the other day.

Apparently Jeb served on the board of a company that Osorio used to bilk investors.

From the Miami Herald: Innovida had a manufacturing facility in North Miami-Dade, and prominent board members including former Gov. Jeb Bush and Miami condo king Jorge Perez, the company never gained traction.

Osorio was convicted of using Innovida, which claimed to produce high-tech building panels, to deceive investors and line his pockets. Osorio, represented by attorney Humberto Dominguez, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge William Dimitrouleas in Fort Lauderdale federal court in February. As part of his plea, the U.S. attorney’s office agreed to drop 19 other charges.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/09/17/3632865_p2/miami-businessman-claudio-osorio.html#storylink=cpy

How many more Jeb Bush straws do we need before the camel’s back breaks and the public realizes what a self absorbed charlatan that he is.

How Billionaires rule our schools.

If Jeb Bush was for puppies I would have to rethink my stance on them or why I am against common core.

Let’s go over a few of Jeb Bush’s biggest hits.

Poor kids should have vouchers to go to private schools, just not the private schools his children went to.

Educating children should be like shopping for milk.

Florida’s state colleges of education should be blown up, Taliban style. Okay I added those last two words.

The class size amendment is a failure and who cares if its initiation corresponds with the modest improvements in Florida schools.

Experience and education for teachers doesn’t matter, that’s right education doesn’t matter in education.

We need to rescue education from the tyranny of unions. You know those all powerful unions assuring teacher’s opulent lifestyles.

We need to be student centered. Um, I don’t know any student who wanted to be tested to death, put in a one track fits all curriculum and not be able to go to any classes they might actually enjoy. You know what happened in Florida because of him.  

His latest man crush is for common core. Now I have some problems with common core. It’s untested, people think it might work but nobody really knows. The country is rolling it out before we are ready. It, if you can believe it, calls for even more testing and finally Jeb Bush is for it.  If Jeb Bush was for puppies I would have to rethink my stance on them.

Jeb Bush has done so much damage to public education and then he has the nerve to say, you might be for lower standards but I am not and he beats on unions and teachers like they were piñatas but then has the nerve to say any attacks on common core are political. This man is a snake oil selling charlatan and if he says common core is what we need you can bet your last dollar we need the opposite.

http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida-politics/jeb-bush-to-common-core-critics-if-youre-comfortable-with-mediocrity-fine/2142545

Education reformers want everybody to be accountable but them.

Accountability, accountability, accountability it is one of the words that education reformers scream to the high heavens. The thing is they are talking about accountability for teachers and public schools not about them. Instead they want you to ignore the man behind the curtain.

Look at charter schools, in Ohio and Florida and all around the country which have become cash cows for hedge fund managers and supporters of the republican party, then there is vouchers in Louisiana and Florida that send children to schools that teach intelligent design or that have teachers without degrees, and what about all the odious teacher evaluation bills that use the value added formulas that can be wildly inaccurate or have teachers evaluated based on students who they never even taught, yeah that one was Florida too.  Then don’t get me started about Teach for America which does the exact opposite of what we know to be best practices and assures our most vulnerable classrooms will have an ever revolving door of camp counselors, who say, I’ll give that a try.

Where is the accountability with charter schools as several have failed in Florida in the last few weeks alone sucking precious resources out of legitimate classrooms? http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/local-education/district-looking-for-new-schools-for-80-charter-sc/nZzxz/

Private schools that take vouchers have no requirements on who they hire and very little on their curriculum. Last year several private schools in Florida, poor, poor Florida, said they would stop taking vouchers if their kids had to take the FCAT, who wants to bet if that had more to do with the poor education they were providing  than their desire to keep the gov’ment out of their schools.  http://jaxkidsmatter.blogspot.com/2013/02/will-florida-private-schools-that-take.html

Pretty much all of this had to do with money too. TFA is used to break the power of collective bargaining which has salary, benefit, working conditions and pension ramifications. Charter schools are being used to line the pockets of real estate moguls, hedge fund managers and Chinese nationals looking for green cards. http://jaxkidsmatter.blogspot.com/2013/09/chinese-investors-making-big-bucks-and.html

Everything bad that has happened is blamed on teachers and schools but I will tell you what, a teacher never cut a budget and no public schools I know thinks it is okay that we have 400 Americans worth 2 trillion dollars while a fifth of our kids live in poverty.

Accountability for us and truck loads full of cash for them.

Despicable

Who does Florida’s Education Commissioner answer too?

Here is a hint; it’s not students, parents, teachers, or even Rick Scott and the Florida legislature. Nope it answers to a higher Power, dramatic pause, Jeb Bush.  

Kathleen Shanahan, Jeb Bush’s former chief of staff asked incoming commissioner Pam Stewart who she reported to.

 From the Palm beach Post:  Kathleen Shanahan, another state board member who also once worked for Bush, wanted assurances that Stewart "understands with full clarity who she reports to." http://www.theledger.com/article/20130917/NEWS/130919156/1005/NEWS02?p=2&tc=pg

Stewart acknowledged that she did know.

Jeb Bush, love him or hate him, and I am in the latter camp, is still incredibly influential in Florida’s education system and it’s him the board and commissioner answer to.  

Northeast Florida educators not elated by Pam Stewart

The headline in the Times Union was, First Coast educators elated Stewart is new state commissioner. Two superintendents, Vitti from Jacksonville and Joyner from St. Johns were quoted saying nice things about her too. Unfortunately for the Times Union they don’t speak for the majority of educators in Northeast Florida.

Why would we want more of the same leadership that has done its best to tear the teaching profession down and who answers solely to Jeb “I think all of the colleges of education should be blown up, larger classes are fine, teachers don’t need job protections and advanced degrees don’t matter, I put my children in exclusive prep schools with well rounded curriculums and small classes where they weren’t tested to death, the opposite of what I want for your kids” Bush.

No we are not elated. We are disappointed and sadly we are used to it.
 

Read more at Jacksonville.com: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2013-09-17/story/first-coast-educators-elated-stewart-new-state-commissioner#ixzz2fGBhxowI

Why Vitti went to the charter conference.

From a reader:

"Know your enemy"

He went to the charter school conference to see the enemy of the institution he represents. He wanted to hear their argument, and see their plans while meeting the elected officials who receive large sums of campaign capital from these organizations.

I believe he knows he is, Charter Money could quash his hire as Superintendent. So he played his cards low until the summer. Then the first move was increasing student responsibility with the end of Grade Recovery as we knew it. He eliminated the use of the Virtual School as a means of grade recovery. He knew the lack of controls which could verify hat students taking the exams were in fact those students taking the course and that the student received no assistance while taking the exams.

He began to move more resources toward elementary schools, not in so much in academics rather in Art Music and P.E. He cut costs by eliminating administrate positions, and ended or greatly curtailed the expenditures for the use of the Schultz Center.

On the negative end, he cut Media Specialists. Elementary schools share, while only a few are able to maintain a full time position. With the standardized tests scores in reading so low, I hope will be revisited and reversed. It is of high importance that students in the twenty first century have the skills to take advantage the many resources necessary to write research papers in all academic areas. He began to build the morale of the beaten down class room teachers by ending grade recovery as we know it.

His staff revised the Code of Student Conduct. He dismissed or demoted extremely toxic administrators. That is not to say that all demoted administrators were toxic, some had their positions eliminated to decrease costs. He has done more to give high school educators more useful planning/parent conference/and horizontal articulation time. In addition this scheduling maximizes student instructional time by the changing the 3.5 classes per day back to a 4.0 classes per day. He gave the class room educator more flexibility in their implementation of the standards based curriculum while maintaining teacher accountability. He acknowledges that most new teachers hold no credentials in Education and with that, he is attempting through common planning time, and PLC to use vertical and horizontal articulation to develop novice educators.

Still too much damage to turn around in an environment which the privileged control so much of the public resources. Tread carefully Vitti. You are reversing over 10 years of ineptitude and complacency

Superintendent Vitti basically says charter schools aren’t public schools.

Today in the Times Union superintendent Vitti talked about bring kids back form charter schools to public schools. Now this is the Vitit I have been waiting for and is drastically different from the one who went to an attract charter schools symposium a few months back. http://jaxkidsmatter.blogspot.com/2013/06/superintendent-vitti-uses-district.html

I think he has a laudable and achievable goal. He is off to a fast start too what with the return of the arts and discipline to our schools but that’s just a start. I think the next step is just to inform the public how charter schools are doing when compared to their public school counterparts and where there are a few good ones for the most part they don’t perform as well as their public school neighbors. That’s a message that the district needs to beat like a drum.   

But what chutzpah our super has, he’s either talking out of both sides of his mouth see paragraph one or he’s saying charter schools are both inferior and not public schools, a sentiment I happen to agree with. I guess time will tell.

To read more click the link: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2013-09-17/story/vitti-says-he-district-ready-pursue-charter-students

Is Jacksonville dying out?

In science they say if it’s not going forward it’s going backwards, well friends our school system seems to be going backwards.

In a piece about the school district seeking to attract charter schools back to it, a laudable and achievable goal, a disturbing figure was brought to light.

From the Times Union: The district’s enrollment was 126,873 in 2003-04 and today that number is 119,188. Meanwhile, charter school enrollment was 609 in 2003-04 and stands at 7,795 this school year. That means during the 03-04 school year there were 127,479 kids in public and charter schools but fast forward a decade and there are only 126,913 a decrease of 566 kids. Now some crappy private schools operating out of abandoned strip malls taking vouchers kids and homeschooling probably explains that number to a degree but still an increase of just a thousand or so kids in a decade should be troublesome. http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2013-09-17/story/vitti-says-he-district-ready-pursue-charter-students

According to city data.com our population went from 735,617, thousand in 2000 to 821,784 in 2010 for an increase of 86,167 but at the same time our school age population went from 142,401, children 5-17 in 2000, to 138,791, a decrease of 2.5 percent in 2010.

http://censusviewer.com/city/FL/Jacksonville?gclid=COLQy-Lj0rkCFShp7Aodzk8AMQ

Where have the kids gone and can we go forward without them?

Board Member Kathleen Shanahan slams Florida Board of Education

From the Tampa Times by Jeff Solochek

Maybe there's something in the water. Or perhaps it's just the liberating feeling of having just a short time left to serve on the Florida Board of Education

Whatever the case, board member Kathleen Shanahan, whose term expires at the end of December, on Tuesday followed in the footsteps of her former colleagues T. Willard Fair and Roberto Martinez in freely offering a heavily critical assessment of the goings on at the highest level of state education policy.

Shanahan, a Tampa businesswoman and one-time Jeb Bush chief of staff, said the board's credibility as an independent, statutorily created entity is at risk as members appear to have no plan to deal with clear problems in the state accountability system. She criticized interim commissioner Pam Stewart for listening rather than leading, saying time was wasting as detailed plans to move ahead had not come forth weeks after questions about Florida's school grading model had come up for a second year.

"We're in crisis time," Shanahan said. "We're still in the same mess we were in that I mentioned in July."

She leveled some shots at Gov. Rick Scott as well, noting that he had not bothered to attend his own education summit, not issued any position papers on next steps, and then floated the idea of an executive 

order on education to come without consulting board members.

"It's embarrassing for him that he's disrespecting the statutory integrity of this board," Shanahan said, urging the board to step up and act.

Chairman Gary Chartrand and Stewart rejected the idea of the state being in crisis mode, but said they agreed that some action is necessary.

Shanahan's comments were much like those of Martinez, the Coral Gables attorney who frequently criticized the department's efforts, particularly under former commissioner Gerard Robinson, as Martinez's term wound down. Fair actually quit the board a short time before his term officially ended in protest of the forced ouster of former commissioner Eric Smith.

The board continues to meet, with the subject of its commissioner search still on the agenda. Watch on Channel 7 of thefloridachannel.org

http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/florida-board-member-kathleen-shanahan-speaks-out-as-her-term-winds-down/2142312#