School choice is nothing but a red herring for privatization.

Living in Florida it’s not just the weather that changes every fifteen minutes but the rationale behind school choice too.

First vouchers and charters were about getting kids out of failing public schools but when it turned out that public schools were doing better than charters, over 260 have failed and nobody has any real idea how voucher schools are doing because the system was set up so they could avoid both financial and academic accountability, they changed the narrative to one that emphasized competition. The reasoning was that competition would make everybody better. Well charters and vouchers as a group didn’t get that memo as one scandal after another has made the headlines and neither perform better than the public schools they are seeking to replace. In fact quite often the only thing they made better were the bank accounts of their operators. 

Now they have changed the narrative once again calling for a Kumbaya moment saying charters and private schools that take vouchers and public schools should let their differences go, hold hands and come together to address what’s best for children. Gone are the failing public school and competition narratives almost like they never existed. Why talk about the past?

I and many others believe this is just another red herring designed to distract us from the dismal record of charters the lack of accountability with vouchers and hide their real agenda which is the destruction of teacher unions and the privatization of our schools.

I wonder what their next narrative will be.

Tallahassee needs to focus on public schools, not charters and vouchers.

Our public education system is designed to benefit us all whether we have a child attending a school or not. This means when we start to weaken it by diverting funds to mostly for profit charter schools which have been marred by closure and scandal after closure and scandal and to vouchers which funnel money into barely regulated schools lacking both financial and academic oversight we are all harmed.

Article nine, section one of the Florida Constitution says: The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education and for the establishment, maintenance, and operation of institutions of higher learning and other public education programs that the needs of the people may require.

The system has been set up so that we have no idea how students that attend schools with vouchers paid for with taxes diverted from the state coffers are doing. Also over 260 charter schools have opened taken public money and failed leaving families and communities in a lurch leaving behind mostly for profit charters behind. I am sure neither of which can be what the framers of our constitution envisioned when they wrote the article above. The three headed monster Tallahassee has created over the last few years is neither uniform, efficient and in the case of vouchers and charters high quality.

In the New Year, Tallahassee should scale back charters and vouchers and invest in our public schools and that’s not just my and millions of people’s opinion, it’s what the Florida constitution demands.

If you don't support vouchers it doesn't mean you are heartless.

As a teacher I disagree with fellow teacher Marlene Desdunes op-ed in the Miami Herald on vouchers and not just because I am heartless. There are many legitimate concerns people should have about vouchers like how they resist both financial and academic accountability and until those issues are resolved it’s beyond me why anybody would support vouchers in the current form but okay earnest people can disagree.

My question is since the vouchers are supposed to be for the neediest of the needy, how is Desdunes family even eligible. According to public records her salary as a school teacher is between 44 and 49 thousand dollars. She writes in her piece which could have been taken right form the Step up for Students, the group that administers the vouchers, FAQ page: “These scholarship children come from homes where the average income is only 5 percent above poverty.” Since her salary nearly doubles what qualifies for poverty, how is her daughter who she says receives a scholarship even eligible?

Therein lies the problem. Vouchers may have been sold as saving poor kids from failing schools but they are being transformed into a replacement for public education and I remind you once again about the almost complete lack of accountability that they have.

I believe as a school teacher Desdunes is way under paid and I will take her word for it that her daughter’s school is wonderful but at the end of the day how many voucher schools are wonderful, how many are providing an adequate education, how many are using the money sent to them properly? The truth is nobody knows because the system was willfully set up that way and wanting to know does not make people heartless. 

To read her piece click the link: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article4699212.html

Vouchers in Florida

The district plays scrooge for Christmas

A story from a reader you could hear thousands of times across the city.

I also teach in Duval County, we have interactive text book our students are not allowed to write in. 

We are told we have to purchase our own copy paper and printer ink for the classroom. 

We are allowed a small number of copies from the office , I would use my allotment in 3 days. 

I use 140 copies a day because we are using alternative resource due to the lack of rigor with the current curriculum. 

We are a title 1 school. Where is the funding going?

That's a good question.

Jacksonville should step up and take care of its teachers.

The JPEF wants to raise your taxes and I think it is a good idea too.

The difference however is what we think the money should be spent on.

I have been advocating for a half cent sales tax for education issues since 2007 and it’s something a few more public education friendly districts have already done.

Palm Beach has a special property tax that pays for Music, PE and Art classes and programs. http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/palm-beach/fl-election-palm-school-bond-20141009-story.html

Broward County has a tax that supports technology too. http://www.broward.k12.fl.us/becon/syst/faqs.htm

Then Orange County has a half cent sales tax for school construction. http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/education/os-orange-school-tax-election-20140820-story.html

But one tax not mentioned above is the three percent income tax imposed on Florida’s teachers and others who pay into the Florida Retirement System. Going on three years ago the legislature took three percent of teachers pay because they said it was needed to shore up the pension system. The problems were numerous. First the pension system did not need shoring up, it was one of the best and healthiest in the nation. Next the money taken from teachers was not put into the pension fund it was put into the general fund and now we know where the surplus Tallahassee is so proud of comes from. Finally my pension did not get three percent better but my pay check sure as heck got three percent smaller. http://jaxkidsmatter.blogspot.com/2013/01/florida-destroys-its-covenant-with.html http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/stateroundup/florida-supreme-court-upholds-law-requiring-state-workers-to-contribute-3/1270970

 

You might be saying but three years ago we were on the brink of an economic disaster, to which I would reply, well since we’re not now how about returning that money to teachers and if things were so desperate then why were we giving tax breaks to friends of Rick Scott and other businesses.  http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2014/jul/07/florida-democratic-party/rick-scott-cut-education-pay-tax-breaks-democratic/

Okay, I feel like I have gotten a little off topic. I guess my point is a small tax increase to pay for technology and construction are both good and needed things but what about helping out teachers? A recent study said Jacksonville was 108 out of 125 in pay for large districts in the entire nation.  http://news.wjct.org/post/researchers-find-error-teacher-study-duval-co-lower-originally-reported

I didn’t become a teacher to get rich but why did it take me ten years to get to 40k, while in other big districts do they either start off that way or it takes less than 5 years to get there and why did Florida feel the need to balance its books on the backs of its teachers? Furthermore why are district administrators worth fair market value but they think they can both get away with and be successful paying teachers on the cheap? http://jaxkidsmatter.blogspot.com/2014/11/duvals-all-about-fair-market-value.html

So when the JPEF asks a question about a new tax to fund education priorities but leaves out giving teachers a decent salary or making up for their losses it is frustrating.

Teachers don’t become teachers to get rich but that doesn’t mean they should be stepped on, abused marginalized or neglected and it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be paid a fair wage for what they do and if Tallahassee isn’t going to step up and do what’s right then the people of Jacksonville should.   

If they are willing to, is a question JPEF should be asking.

Fans of school vouchers refuse to answer legitimate concerns.

They say they are for the poor and mostly minority students who have the least but then shrug their shoulders at the massive cuts to Bright Futures which disproportionately effects poor and mostly minority students the most.

They say they have to take a norm referenced tests, well if they are so great why don’t we dump the high stakes testing agenda for public schools and say they can take the same types of tests too?   

They say they save money while at the same time districts lament the millions and millions of dollars they are losing.

They say they are just for poor families but then ask you not to remember that they expanded the eligibility for a family of four from making just over 20 thousand to making just over sixty.

Furthermore the supporters of vouchers usually are also for S.T.E.M, Common Core and teacher accountability but shrug their shoulders at those things for private schools that take vouchers where teachers do not have to be certified nor curriculums recognized.

Also private schools that take less than a quarter of million dollars, the vast majority of them, don’t even have to report how they spend the money and since over seventy percent of the money goes to religious institutions we have effectively dismantled the first amendment too.

Finally this program with the barest of oversight is allowed to expand 25 percent a year, in less than five years it will take a billion dollars annually out of the state coffers and our education system.

Despite all this voucher proponents would have you believe the program is fine and those that oppose it or have legitimate questions are just heartless seeking to harm poor and mostly minority children.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Senator Allan Hayes, went from sane and reasonable to Bat-Sh*t crazy in the span of a few short days.

I guess in Florida we should be happy when it comes to education for even just a little bit of sanity.

Allan Hayes went from saying: "Schoolteachers in the audience and the administrators, please correct me if my perception is incorrect. But I think that what no one has mentioned in here today - We are engaged in the destruction of our talent pool in education. No teacher that I know of is going to want to continue to teach under these kinds of trying circumstances. They’re leaving like crazy. Understand this. They’re leaving like rats off a sinking ship. And they’re quality teachers. They have the intellect and the ability to move into the business world and make far more money than they’re making as teachers, under far less trying circumstances.

And not only that, but we’re poisoning the well. How many high school students do you know that are experiencing this train wreck and hearing all this stuff and seeing it first hand are going to want to go to college to become a teacher? It’s not going to happen. This is a mess and we need to stop it right now."

To filing legislation requiring both 8^th and 11^th graders to watch Dinesh D’souza’s, America: imagine the world without her, widely regarded as the worst of the worst of right-wing propaganda.

Now I have joked kids should watch the HBO series OZ and then after each episode saying, and that’s the good part of the prison, but I was joking where Senator Hayes sadly seems to be being serious.

He went from nailing it to being old man Mcgilicutty yelling at imaginary kids to get off his lawn.

It’s not just the weather that changes every fifteen minutes in Florida.

Sonita Young predicted Duval County would have few highly effective teachers

And that’s because she was part of the team that set up the system to be that way.

From an October 2012 Times Union article: Sonita Young, the district's chief human resources officer said , It’s likely, that very few teachers will fall into the “highly effective” category under the new system. Most of Duval’s teachers are going to fall under “effective” or “needs improvement” because there isn’t a correlation between the existing definition of “highly effective” and the new one.

http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2012-05-09/story/duval-teachers-skeptical-about-new-evaluations-system#ixzz1uPOp4Q7o

This makes it seems like she is okay with that and her prediction has come true as Duval has one of the lowest percentages of highly effective teachers in the state. 

What were the reasons we selected a system meant to undervalue teachers? Well I believe it is because the district both does not appreciate teachers and wants to save money. Regardless if you agree or not Young’s 2012 prediction has come true.

Is UNF part of the solution or the problem?

First once again I would like to thank Dr. Michael Binder for getting back to me about questions I had about the JPEF/UNF opinion poll taken last week. His answers were all very reasonable but I think he missed my point and that is, does UNF want to be part of the problem or part of the solution?

If UNF blindly takes questions from JPEF, or any organization for that matter and just presents their findings then they are part of the problem, they have just tacitly endorsed their agenda. Despite the P standing for Public in JPEF’s name, I believe their overall, far reaching goal is the privatization of public education.

When I asked why giving money to teachers wasn’t an option with potential new taxes, implying JPEF considered them after thoughts, Dr. Binder wrote:  Again, I would direct that question to JPEF.   I could venture guesses, none of which are as Machiavellian as you're implying, but they would simply be guesses.

Let’s talk about Machiavellian.

Since 2010 when JPEF arrived charter schools have increased by nearly 400 percent, from 10 to 35. Teach for America the same going from 50 members to 200.

A block of the JPEF board gave a considerable amount of money to a candidate in each school board race, after JPEF promised other nonprofits they would remain impartial, winning 3 out of four contests. They also created the QEA which has pushed from behind closed doors the market ideas they champion.

They have donated substantially to the public policy institute at Jacksonville University and to WJCT which gave Gary Chartrand a champion of education award. Undoubtedly they have purchased influence at both places.

The same Gary Chartrand, never an educator is chairman of the state board of education has said, anybody can be a teacher, it’s good that they don’t have work protections and has used his position to support charters over district objections state wide and would like nothing better than for Jacksonville to be the first open enrollment district in the state. Okay that last part was conjecture on my part but nothing else was.   

He is the prince and JPEF is his steed. His goal is the destruction of public education and teaching as a profession. I will let you decide if that is conjecture or not.

I believe UNF should take the time to ask questions because if they did that then they would get better answers for the city, right now they are just presenting the answers JPEF wants them to.