Fla. GOP extorting local school boards
Ever since Jeb Bush started peddling his school privatization schemes as governor twenty years ago, Florida Republicans have starved local school districts of funding, blocked them from raising taxes to keep up with rising costs, and siphoned off $billions in capital outlay intended for renovations and new construction.
Last year over a dozen Florida school districts, struggling to keep up with all the mandates coming from Tallahassee, like computer testing and hardening of schools, proposed local referenda to increase property taxes so that public school teachers could get a raise. Every single one of them passed.
All the while, charter school operator remained silent, even encouraging their parents to vote No. Because school boards and their superintendents made it clear they weren’t going getting any of the money.
But now a bill filed by House Ways and Means Committee Chair Bryan Avila would allow the state to withhold funding from districts that don’t share their referendum money with charter schools.
The Hialeah Republican says, “Teachers are teachers.” But charter schools are businesses and can pay their employees as they want.
“Apparently their business model needs another injection of taxpayer money at the expense of the traditional public schools.
“The claims by Republican legislators that they are only trying to be fair to all teachers ring hollow. They won’t raise taxes, and they won’t adequately fund public schools.” https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/edit...
The measure, of course, has no oversight to ensure that charters actually use the money to increase teacher pay, as the voters intended.
But when Orlando Representative Anna Eskamani proposed to amend the bill adding accountability — you know, so, like, the tax payers don’t end up paying for CEO bonuses, instead — that amendment failed.
Funny how the same people demanding accountability from teachers shrug it off when it comes to their corporate masters.
Critics say the bill amounts to extortion. “Either pay, or your neighborhood public school gets it.”
This week the bill advanced through committee along party lines, on the heels of a report published by the Network for Public Education detailing how how the US DOE wasted over $billion on charter that never taught a single student.
http://www.tampabay.com/florida-polit...
Fla. GOP extorting local school boards - YouTube
It’s taken years of concerted effort but, at long last, Betsy DeVos and the Koch brothers can finally claim victory: Teachers in Michigan are now paid less today in both real and corrected-for-inflations dollars. In 2009, the average teacher salary in our state was $63,025. In 2017, the most recent year for which we have data, the average was only $61,908. Adjusted for inflation, that’s 
