JEB! Comes to Harvard
It seems JEB! is back, sort of. He has taken on a new gig as a lecturer about education policy this fall at Harvard University. His position will be to present on education issues at theProgram on Education Policy and Governance, which is part of the Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government. Valerie Strauss reports that he will be lecturing in a course titled, “The Political Economy of the School.”
Let’s review Jeb Bush’s contributions to education policy in Florida, where he was a governor who prioritized education “reform.” Later, after his term as governor of Florida ended, he founded a national education advocacy organization, the Foundation for Excellence in Education. This blog has covered Bush’s ideas and so-called school reform “accomplishments”here and here in posts that highlighted a report by Lindsey Layton for the Washington Postand an in-depth profile by Alec MacGillis in the New Yorker.
Here is a brief summary. Jeb worked very hard to bring school vouchers to Florida. His first attempt back in 1998, the centerpiece of his gubernatorial campaign, was later found to violate the state’s constitution, but eventually he got the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program operating. He rapidly expanded charter schools during his term, and he encouraged the non-profit schools to hire the big for-profit management chains to operate the schools. Bush introduced the A-F letter grades for schools and school districts that this blog has shown to promote segregation by income across metropolitan areas in states that have tried it. Under Governor Bush, Florida launched the (much-copied) Third Grade Guarantee, that denies promotion to fourth grade for any third-grader who cannot pass the state’s reading test—even though research demonstrates that retention-in-grade at any time in a student’s academic life increases the risk of dropping out when the student becomes an adolescent. After his term as governor ended, Bush formed an education advocacy foundation to promote privatization and his other pet education theories. This Foundation for Excellence in Education created Chiefs for Change, a network of far-right state secretaries of education who were shown to be willing to be paired with corporations in the education sector and who fanned out across other states JEB! Comes to Harvard | janresseger:
