Tag Archives | Florida Education Association

rebuttED: Tax credit scholarships (“vouchers”) don’t drain money from public schools

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On April 24, 2012 in Funding, School Choice, Unionism

No matter how many times critics of parental choice say it, it’s still not true: Tax credit scholarships in Florida (aka vouchers) do not drain money from public schools.

The latest example: An op-ed in Sunday’s Ocala Star Banner by Andy Ford, president of the state teachers union. Ford (pictured below) focuses on the state of education funding in Florida, and much of what he argues is undeniable. These are tough times for schools. The money that Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature scraped together for education this year is still billions short of where the state was five years ago. I have one child in public school. In a few months, I’ll have two. I sympathize.

But then Ford redirects his financial argument toward tax-credit scholarships, suggesting they’re part of the reason why public schools are in dire straits. “There’s also money in the budget for expanding charter schools and increasing money for corporate voucher schools,” he writes. “Here’s another example of political leaders favoring unproven and less-accountable schools over our traditional neighborhood schools.”

He concludes: “At a time when the governor and lawmakers doled out more tax giveaways for corporations, more money for unaccountable voucher schools and more support and freedom for for-profit charter schools, our public schools are given a budget far from adequate and far from a true investment in our children.”

We’ll save the issue of accountability for another day, because it’s the pervasive myth of financial loss that resonates most with parents and voters. Despite what Ford says, one credible, independent report after another has found tax credit scholarships save taxpayer money. The Collins Center for Public Policy came to that conclusion, as did Florida Tax Watch, the Office of Program Policy Analysis & Government Accountability and, just last month, an impact report from Florida’s Revenue Estimating Conference. The latter found the tax credit program will save taxpayers $57.9 million next year alone. Continue Reading →

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Proposed repeal of Florida’s Blaine Amendment off state ballot — for now

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On December 14, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Religious education, School Choice

A Florida judge has ruled that language in a proposed repeal of Florida’s Blaine Amendment is ambiguous and misleading, and has ordered the Secretary of State to remove the proposal from the 2012 ballot for now, The Associated Press and St. Petersburg Times are reporting.

But the victory could be short-lived for the Florida Education Association, which challenged the amendment. Although Circuit Judge Terry Lewis found the ballot summary misleading, he’s letting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi rewrite the summary for another review.

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Duffy blazed a trail for a new unionism. Who will follow?

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On September 13, 2011 in Charter Schools, General, Teacher empowerment, Unionism

A.J. Duffy, the former president of United Teachers Los Angeles and outspoken critic of charter schools, illustrated the dilemma teacher unions are facing when he recently explained why he is now running a Los Angeles charter school:

I saw that despite the promises made by the district to pilot school leaders, the district just piled the bureaucratic rules back on and never made good on the promises of autonomy. The only way to make a difference is to have real independence. Besides, charters were started in the first place from the ideas of a real union leader — Al Shanker — he wanted teacher-led schools. I want teacher-led schools. I believe that will be best for the students.

Teachers began forming industrial unions fifty years ago to protect themselves from the abuses of school districts, which were political monopolies. I became a teacher union organizer in the winter of 1978 when a colleague lost her job for rejecting the sexual advances of her boss. My two primary union mentors had both been fired in the sixties because of their political beliefs. Agriculture was king in Florida back then and the political elite ruled public education like a plantation. Workers were expected to be docile conformists who did what they were told, and any questioning of authority was not tolerated.

After a long political struggle we succeeded in implementing procedures that protected education employees from these political abuses, but unfortunately that’s where we stopped. We never used our collective power to transform these political monopolies and that failure is haunting teacher unions today. Increasingly teachers, parents and taxpayers want teacher unions to do more than protect teachers from dysfunctional school systems. They want teacher unions to help transform those systems. They want teachers to be empowered to create more diverse learning options for parents, and they want parents empowered to match their children with the learning options that best meet their needs. They want teacher unions to put the interest of teachers, parents, students and taxpayers over the interests of school districts.

By becoming a charter school operator, Duffy has put teachers and students first, but don’t expect other teacher union leaders to follow suit while they’re still in office. Teacher unions are feeling insecure at the moment and consequently are highly resistant to change. Just last spring, I watched as the Florida Education Association pushed out its talented chief of staff, Alfreda Davis, as she was trying to move the union out of its siege mentality by finding common ground with social justice efforts like the tax credit scholarship program I lead.

Nonetheless, public education is expanding beyond school districts, teacher and parent empowerment is increasing and a few teacher union leaders are beginning to speculate in private about post-industrial teacher unionism. Duffy may have been the first large urban union leader to run a charter school after leaving office, but he won’t be the last.

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From the archives: The FEA on lost influence

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On August 4, 2011 in Charter Schools, Education and Public Policy, General, School Choice, Testing and Accountability, Unionism, Virtual Education

Now that a document highlighting lobbying machinations at an AFT affliate in Connecticut has stoked another conversation about teacher unionism and parent empowerment, redefinED wanted to reach into its archives and pull out a memo from the public policy director at the Florida Education Association that also reflects on a singular concern among teachers unions: lost membership.

RedefinED host Doug Tuthill reported on the memo last fall after FEA policy director Jeff Wright urged members to head to the polls and keep Rick Scott out of Florida’s governor’s mansion. Why? Wright said that Scott would enhance merit-pay practices and expand school choice, specifically pointing to enhanced voucher, charter and virtual school policies along with “merit pay in its worst form” that would “obliterate FEA’s and our local unions’ influence.”

“If we are no longer strong due to reduction in the number of people served by public schools,” Wright continued, “then they can do what they want with the education budgets of today.”

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James Blaine, Charley Johns, and Anita Bryant?

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On August 1, 2011 in Catholic education, General, Parental Choice, Unionism

Reasonable people can disagree over whether government should be paying for children to attend religious schools, but Florida’s latest ballot initiative reminds us how little reason plays a role in Blaine amendment debates.

The Florida Education Association already has sued to remove Amendment 7 from the 2012 ballot, and it makes a reasonable point when it argues that the ballot title, “Religious Freedom,” tends to obscure the actual goal of the provision. The amendment is aimed at allowing the state to financially support programs that may have a faith-based component. It specifically deletes this constitutional prohibition: “No revenue of the state or any political subdivision or agency thereof shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution.”

Of course, these debates are seldom about just the language. They are first and foremost political wars that follow traditional partisan fault lines, so FEA president Andy Ford was also eager to tell reporters: “This is a shady way of opening the door for school vouchers for all.” A progressive political consultant and a history professor then took to the pages of the state’s largest newspaper to brand Amendment 7 as the “Pony Up for Religion and Pave the Way for Vouchers Act.”

The column was a feast of hyperbole, but most notable for its comparisons to: 1) the Charley Johns Committee, Florida’s own legislative version of McCarthyism in the 1950s and 60s that spread well beyond Communism and invaded the private lives of professors, blacks and homosexuals; and 2) Anita Bryant’s ugly attack on gay rights in the 1970s. It’s not entirely clear whether the authors intended to suggest that passage of Amendment 7 would promote rampant discrimination against blacks or gays, but missing from their historical condemnation were the authors of the Blaine amendments. For that equally well-documented historical bigotry they offer only that: “Sponsors of Amendment 7 allege the no-aid provision has roots in anti-Catholic sentiment.”

Suffice it to say that these debates do not bring out the best in either side. What is also confounding is how these showdowns seem determined to ignore the degree to which church and state mix in everyday life. Florida indeed has its own no-aid clause, which is deemed to go further than the Establishment Clause to the U.S. Constitution. Yet  people on both sides of this divide acknowledge that such aid exists in multiple ways that neither is prepared to challenge: charitable deductions, property tax exemptions, scholarships at religious universities, vouchers for 4-year-olds at faith-based centers and churches, scholarships for poor and disabled students at faith-based schools to name just a few.

I’m not trying to be dismissive of constitutional clarity, and I don’t blame FEA for challenging the amendment. It’s what the union is conditioned and financed to do. But in the arena of education reform, which increasingly includes finding different ways to reach children with different learning needs, it just feels mostly like a distraction.

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A lost opportunity, and friendship, at FEA

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On May 16, 2011 in General, Parent empowerment, Unionism

For the second time in three years, the top African-American official in the Florida Education Association has been pushed out of the organization. FEA Chief of Staff Alfreda Davis, the former Chief of Staff for Washington, D.C. mayor Anthony Williams and a gifted leader, has been given a severance check after only 15 months on the job. She had replaced Aaron Wallace, who met a similar fate.

This is painful to watch, both as a former FEA local president who for years pushed the organization to be more progressive, and as the current head of a scholarship program that serves low-income children of color. Alfreda told me she was eager to move FEA beyond its siege mentality and wanted to find common ground with social justice programs like the one I lead – a Tax Credit Scholarship that gives more learning options to low-income families. But soon after we began strategizing she left.

Alfreda and other progressive leaders within FEA, such as Gary Stevenson, the FEA’s former Director of Organizing and Field Services who left just prior to Alfreda, were frustrated with how conservative the organization had become. They were particularly concerned about the FEA’s refusal to reach out and find common ground with low-income families, especially low-income families of color.

I’ve known some of the men now running the organization for more than 30 years. They have a strong intellectual commitment to progressive values, including racial equality, but they are committed to a model of public education and blue-collar industrial unionism that is incapable of delivering equal opportunity and social justice, and it’s this contradiction that is crippling the organization and eroding its effectiveness. A top-down, command and control model of public education that systematically disempowers teachers and parents will always be less effective and efficient, and organizing a union around protecting this system will always be a losing proposition. That’s where the FEA is today.

In the mid-1990s I wrote a series of essays calling for a new unionism in public education. I argued that instead of using our collective power to protect teachers from dysfunctional systems, we should use our power to transform these systems. My friend Bob Chase was elected NEA president in 1995 on a new unionism platform, but abandoned the idea when faced with heavy opposition from the NEA’s industrial unionists. The concept has been dead ever since.

Public education is in desperate need of a progressive union movement that embraces social justice activists such as Alfreda Davis and Gary Stevenson. Unfortunately, the conservatism that now permeates our education unions is going to be with us for a while.

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Rattling the constitutional cage

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On January 24, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, School Choice

Ron Meyer is the longtime attorney for the Florida Education Association who has succeeded in getting Florida’s original school voucher program and an independent charter school authorizing panel thrown out in the courts. So when he threatens to sue two other voucher programs if the state moves forward with an even larger plan to provide stipends to any public school student who switches to private school, his warning begs an obvious question. Why hasn’t he sued already? The other two programs have existed for a decade.

Welcome to the constitutional cloud through which most ambitious states are now flying as they try to square a 21st century education with what in most cases are largely 19th century constitutional scripts.

Meyer is a smart and experienced attorney who is earning his pay when he says, as he did Sunday to Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinel, that: “If we go back to court now – and I think we would go back to court if there were this voucher-for-everybody concept – these other programs would be impacted.”

So let’s put aside the bravado and look through his constitutional lens. Like many states, Florida has a provision for a “uniform” system of public schools. A variation first appeared in 1868, as a call for a “uniform system of Common Schools” aimed at establishing the ambition that all schools would possess similar resources. But in 2006, the Florida Supreme Court threw out former Gov. Jeb Bush’s Opportunity Scholarship Program because “it diverts public dollars into separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools.” Continue Reading →

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