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Wednesday, May 1, 2019

CURMUDGUCATION: Florida Really Is The Worst

CURMUDGUCATION: Florida Really Is The Worst

Florida Really Is The Worst




There are plenty of states in the country that are not very friendly to public education, but Florida under its new governor has established itself as the very worst state for public education. The worst. Its hatred of public school teachers and its absolute determination to dismantle public education so that it can sell off the pieces to privatizers and profiteers puts the sunshine state in the front of the pack.

The Newest Baloney

The latest nail in the coffin is Senate Bill 7070, a bill that adds yet another school choice program to the Florida portfolio of choiceness. That bill was passed today and now needs only Governor DeSantis's signature, which it will get quickly. The bill offers up vouchers that can be used for private schools, including the religion-based ones, like the ones that teach dinosaurs and humans roamed the earth together and the ones that maintain their right to discriminate against, well, whoever. The vouchers will be one more drain on the public tax dollars intended to fund public education, but then, a key feature of the Florida approach has been to keep underfunding public schools so that charter and private schools can look better by comparison.


No signs of help for education anywhere on the horizon
One Democratic representative during the discussion of this bill pointed out that Florida has been proud of its accountability system (the stupid test-score based awarding of letter grades to schools) and these vouchers will completely circumvent that system.

"What are we doing?" Montford said. "We're allowing them to take public funds to go to schools where the standards are not as high, or maybe don't have any standards. And worse than that, we don't even know what those standards are. Why are we supporting allowing parents to take their children to schools that don't fit the accountability system that we all are so proud of? Why are we doing that?"

Just spitballing here, but I'm betting the answer is "The accountability system was just a tool for CONTINUE READING: 
CURMUDGUCATION: Florida Really Is The Worst