Jeb Bush’s Florida Education Plan Created Corruption and Chaos
“We’re making decisions just based on the money.”
That’s Rosemarie Jensen talking, a tone of exasperation creeping into her voice as she describes the influence of money on education policy in South Florida. “Some things should be run like a business,” she tells me in a coffee shop near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “Education isn’t one of those things.”
Jensen lives in Broward County, just to the north of Miami-Dade. Broward is home to a diverse population of students, drawn from the state’s most exclusive gated communities as well as neighborhoods wracked by generational poverty. A former K-12 school teacher and current public school parent, Jensen is part of a growing movement of parents who believe they are being shut out of important decisions about public school governance, while those making the decisions too often have something monetary to gain.
As a leader of United Opt Out, an organization that advocates boycotting standardized tests in public schools, Jensen has opted her own son, a special education student in high school, out of the Florida state exam now known as the Florida Standards Assessments. But standardized testing isn’t the only thing that’s got her steamed.
Jensen recounts stories of her father, a first-generation immigrant and high school dropout, who cleaned out tankers so he could raise his daughter in a neighborhood with good public schools and eventually send her to college. Today, she sees that idealistic view of the American dream being undone in her community by an invasion of moneyed interests promoting charter schools.
In her view, charter schools — the privately managed, publicly funded entities that operate outside the oversight of democratically governed school systems — are not now what they originally claimed to be: centers of innovation created by teachers and parents. Jensen has taken note of the amount of money these schools spend on advertising and marketing. She complains that the middle school her children attended can’t get money to construct a safer point of entry, while the state steers funds to charters for new construction. She believes that making public schools compete with charter schools for money dilutes funding that should be paying for better education for all children. While she used to be open-minded about these Jeb Bush’s Florida Education Plan Created Corruption and Chaos:
