How Jeb Bush’s school reforms really played out in Florida
Jeb Bush talks a great deal about his record on education when he was governor of Florida from 1999-2007 and later as a private citizen through his Foundation for Excellence in Education. As governor, he introduced school reforms that have become common across the country — including high-stakes standardized testing for “accountability” purposes and school “choice” — and since then has been a leading voice in spreading his education gospel nationwide. His critics call him not a “reformer” but a “privatizer” of public education in part because of his attitude abouttraditional public schools — calling them “politicized, unionized monopolies” or “government-run monopolies run by unions” — while advocating for charter schools as well as voucher and voucher-like programs, which use public money to pay private school tuition for students.
How successful were Bush’s reforms in Florida? He, of course, says they were enormously successful. Others don’t. To understand what really happened, I had an e-mail conversation with professor Sherman Dorn of the University of South Florida, who has spent years researching and writing about public education in the Sunshine State. He maintains a blog about public education at www.shermandorn.com.
Here’s our conversation:
Q) Let’s start with the basics. When Jeb Bush became governor of Florida in 1999, how did he proceed in terms of school reform?
A) In his first term, most of Jeb Bush’s efforts in education came in three areas: test-based accountability, private-school vouchers, and support for improved reading instruction. In 1999, Bush signed legislation that required annual testing of all children in grades 3-10, tied test scores to annual “A” through “F” labels assigned to local public and charter schools, and required retention of children in third grade if they did not meet critical scores in the state reading test or provide other evidence of reading skill. In the same year, the Florida legislature created two voucher programs, one tied to the state labeling of local public schools and the other available to children with disabilities. Bush also created the Florida Center for Reading Research in 1999, which used both state and federal funding to support classroom teachers and reading coaches.The real-estate boom in Florida at the time made it relatively easy for the state legislature to add funding in the form of bonuses for teachers in schools labeled A (or in schools with improved labels), and to support the hiring of hundreds of reading coaches in Florida’s elementary schools. Bush left office at the peak of the boom years and never had to face budget crises that are a regular part of state politics now.
Q) Bush frequently talks about how his test-based policies led to higher test scores. I’m not sure if he was referring to NAEP or to FCAT. What happened with the test scores and the achievement gap?
A) Most of the time that Bush or his policy advocates talk about Florida children’s achievement, they refer to NAEP. Attached are some relevant materials taken from the NAEP website, comparing reading and math scores between Florida’s students and the rest of the country for grades 4, 8, and 12 for the years where Florida scores can be separated out and where NAEPHow Jeb Bush’s school reforms really played out in Florida - The Washington Post:
