Florida: Death To Public Education
Florida has long struggled to take the lead in the State Most Hostile To Public Education contest, with North Carolina, Wisconsin and Nevada giving some real competition. But last week, Florida’s legislature and governor took a decisive leap forward.
Let there be no doubt ― no state is more hostile to the very idea of public education than Florida.
Can I give you a quick list of the many ways that Florida has spat on public education in the past? They tried to undermine the teaching of science. They have remained studiously devoted to the idea of the Big Standardized Test, even though they can’t seem to get one right (and even to the point of cancelling actual education and requiring students to pledge allegiance to the test). But their devotion to the BS Test is so great that they hounded the mother of a dying child and went to court to keep children out of fourth grade who had demonstrated mastery of reading― but not on the BS Test. They have committed to a merit pay plan (well, with every kind of commitment except funding) that is one of the dumbest and most insulting versions of the oft-disproven concept of merit pay ever seen. They have turned recess into a political football. They have stood in a courtroom and declared that teacher-given grades are meaningless. They implementbad retail management practices in their education system. They serve as the home base for FEE, the astro-turf edu-group that was supposed to help propel Jeb! Bush to the White House (as well as other failed astro-turf for the Common Core failures). In the face of a teacher shortage, they got rid of tenure and have since used it make the shortage worse by purging teachers who speak up about abuses they see. They host some of the research in How To Replace Teachers (and Students) With CGI Avatars, as well as some disastrously failed Gates “research” about teaching. They are pioneers in the destructive and not-remotely-useful A-F school grading system. And while they have pursued these new horizons in the destruction of public schools and the teaching profession, they’ve also kept the door open so that good old-fashioned racist underfunding of public schoolscan continue unimpeded.
But then, letting terrible crap happen without standing in its way (well, unless it’s those Florida: Death To Public Education | HuffPost:
