The big Jeb Bush charter school lie: How Florida became a cautionary tale for the rest of the country
Liberty City's schools were supposed to provide a pathway out of poverty. Instead, they've invited profiteering
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
When people begin a story about how to fix America, they often start with education, and they often start in communities like Liberty City. Liberty City lies to the west of Miami Beach, across the Biscayne Bay and away from the sun-washed beaches and sparkling towers of the “Magic City.”According to Wikipedia, Liberty City started out as the first public housing project in the American South when President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the construction of the Liberty Square housing development during the Great Depression. Now the area is known as Miami’s roughest neighborhood, a place where riots broke out in 1980 after Miami cops beat an unarmed black man to death.
If that incident reminds you of recent events, that’s because Liberty City — like Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland — is another place where perpetual harms done to a community manifest themselves in poorly performing schools with high dropout rates and low student achievement. What’s supposed to fix places like Liberty City, we’re often told, is a “big change” — one that has to come right away, and is usually prescribed by people who don’t live in the community.
In 1996, Liberty City was the place Jeb Bush chose to introduce his big change — charter schools, the privately managed, publicly funded schools that operate outside the oversight of democratically governed school systems. Bush created Florida’s first charter school in Liberty City in an attempt to salvage a faltering political image by building credibility on both the education and civil rights fronts. But Liberty City Charter School proved to be much more than a campaign prop, sparking as it did a bushfire of charter school startups across Florida that continues to this day. Now there are over 600 charter schools in the state, and Florida’s policies for charter school governance – ranked in the nation’s top 10 by charter industry advocates — are touted as models for the rest of the nation.
But what kind of change did Bush’s new plans for charter schools bring to Liberty City and the rest of the Sunshine State? It’s not hard to find out. Scratch just beneath the surface and what you find is that as the ranks of Florida charter schools have swollen, the pathway out of poverty these schools were supposed to provide now looks more like a detour to exploitation and profit-making. In fact, the big change Jeb Bush promised is not so much a model for other states to adopt as it is a glaring warning sign for them to heed.
The Movement Jeb Built
Jeb Bush’s road to charter school cheerleading may have started with a disastrous political faux pas. As Kathleen McGrory reports for the Tampa Bay Times, in the mid-’90s Bush was on the hunt for a way to recover from a “bruising defeat” in the 1994 Florida gubernatorial election. As McGory writes, his electoral defeat was haunted by a memorable gaffe in a televised debate when he and his opponent, incumbent governor and eventual victor Lawton Chiles, were asked what they would do for black voters. Bush replied, “Probably nothing.”
As the words “‘probably nothing,’ echoed across the state,” McGory writes, after his defeat Bush started his image recovery program by creating a “privately funded conservative research institute” called Foundation for Florida’s Future.
“Running the foundation allowed Bush to keep his public profile high, shape legislation in Tallahassee and cultivate a vibrant state and national network of financial backers,” reported the St. Petersburg Times in 1998. Although FFF was not required to disclose its financial contributors, the St. Petersburg reporters traced the organization’s money sources to influential industries, business leaders, and Republican Party supporters.
From the beginning, McGory notes, “the foundation devoted much of its resources to a new concept in education: charter schools.”
Beginning in the 1990s, conservatives increasingly looked to charter schools as tools to impose competition in local school systems and instill a market-based philosophy in public education.
As charter schools began to pop up here and there around the country, there’s no doubt Bush was aware of the trend. In fact, according to a recent article by Alec MacGillis in the New Yorker, the same year Bush founded his own advocacy group, he also “joined the board of the Heritage Foundation, which was generating papers and proposals to break up what it viewed as the government-run monopoly of the public-school system through free-market competition, with charters and private-school vouchers.”
Bush also undoubtedly understood how charter schools could provide him with a politically advantageous space to appear concerned about black kids and families while advancing a conservative idea.
There was just one problem. Charter schools weren’t yet legal in Florida. So Bush found a way to change that. He leveraged his friendship with Miami civil rights activist T. Willard Fair, who had long advocated for direct interventions in the city’s troubled schools. According to the New Yorker article, Bush approached Fair and asked, “‘Why don’t you start a charter school?’ ‘What’s a charter school?’ Fair replied.”
Over a 90-minute discussion, Bush planted the ideal of charter schools firmly in Fair’s The big Jeb Bush charter school lie: How Florida became a cautionary tale for the rest of the country - Salon.com:
