Tag Archives | Rick Scott

Florida Gov. Rick Scott signs school “voucher” expansion bill

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On March 23, 2012 in General

Florida Gov. Rick Scott on Friday signed into law a bill expanding the state’s tax-credit scholarship program for low-income students.

Florida’s tax credit scholarship program is the largest of its kind in the country, currently serving more than 38,000 students. It’s funded by corporations that receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit in return for contributions.

The bill increases the cap on contributions by $10.25 million next year, to a total of $229 million. The current cap is $175 million, but by law it was set to rise to $218.75 million next year. More about the bill here.

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Universal choice plan passes Florida Senate panel

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On April 14, 2011 in Customization, Education and Public Policy, General, Parental Choice, Private Schools, School Choice

Florida’s Senate Education Committee just passed a plan that would make a voucher or other money for educational expenses universally accessible to Florida families. Despite its “vouchers-for-all” moniker, the proposed bill creating Education Savings Accounts passed with the support of one Democrat, Bill Montford, who also serves as the chief executive of the Florida Association of District School Superintendents. 

“I’ve got some serious concerns,” Montford said. “But this concept is certainly worth exploring.”

The support is all the more notable considering Gov. Rick Scott himself backed away from the idea before the state’s legislative session began last month. Scott’s education transition team recommended the savings account, inspired by the Goldwater Institute, and proposed funding each participating family with an amount equal to 90 percent of what the state would pay per pupil in public schools. A torrent of criticism followed, even from those who favored vouchers in various designs, including from Cato Institute scholar Andrew J. Coulson.

The current plan would pay an amount only equivalent to 40 percent of the per-pupil allocation and there would be no income restriction on eligibility. The account could be used for educational expenses that include private school tuition, private tutoring, textbooks or college savings plans.

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Florida state school board chair resigns in protest

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On March 24, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General

T. Willard Fair, the chairman of the Florida State Board of Education, has resigned to protest Gov. Rick Scott’s move to force Education Commissioner Eric J. Smith out of office, The Associated Press is reporting.

Fair, who was term limited, said a move to conduct a national search to replace Smith was bogus. In his letter of resignation, Fair wrote that a national search “flies in the face of reality that Governor Scott will choose his new commissioner.

As the AP notes, Fair was term limited but stayed on because Scott has not yet appointed his successor. Fair also complained that the governor didn’t tell the board that he wanted a change in education commissioners until two days after Smith announced his pending resignation. In his letter to the board, Smith said his resignation would be effective June 10. “The time has come,” Smith wrote, “to allow our newly elected Governor to have input through the State Board of Education on the type of leader to pursue his goals for education.”

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What Rick Scott and Barack Obama have to say about education

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On March 9, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General

No one would identify Florida Gov. Rick Scott as a philosophical soul mate to Barack Obama, but Scott’s remarks on education during last evening’s State of the State address bore many similarities to the State of the Union and another recent speech Obama gave in Miami during a visit with Jeb Bush. His 450-word passage on “an education system full of new energy” seemed almost Obama-like. He spoke to the importance of revamping the way we evaluate teachers and increasing the number of charter schools — both of which are touchstones of Obama’s education agenda.

Notably, Scott stayed away from his more controversial ideas for school vouchers, and he was silent on the subject of virtual education, which he called “a critical component of the future education” during his campaign. There’s nothing to indicate that Scott will soften his ambitions to expand school choices, including private options, but it’s interesting to compare his remarks on education with those of the president. Continue Reading →

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The State of the Sunshine State

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On March 8, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General

Florida Gov. Rick Scott will deliver his first State of the State speech this evening, and whatever he may say about education, political observers in the Sunshine State already are calling this legislative session one of the most consequential, and controversial, for public education.

Michelle Rhee has visited the state several times, in part to encourage legislators to pass Senate Bill 736, Florida’s latest effort to revamp teacher contracts and evaluations. SB 736 is already on the Senate’s calendar, and lawmakers are seeking to remake the educational landscape with bills that would facilitate universal vouchers or a widely expanded array of online educational opportunities. All this would spark a volatile debate without the governor’s proposal to cut 10 percent off the per-pupil formula paid to public schools to help bankroll operational costs. The state must close a $4 billion budget gap.

RedefinED will have updates on these and other measures as the Legislature convenes during the next couple of months. This is a list of bills we’ll be paying attention to: Continue Reading →

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The cameras focused on Rhee and Scott, but the school was really the star attraction

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On January 7, 2011 in Charter Schools, Customization, General, Testing and Accountability

When Michelle Rhee visited a Miami charter school on Thursday to announce that Florida would be the first state to partner with her Students First initiative, it may have been easy for most observers to focus on the star power of the event and not the venue. But the reason that Rhee and newly elected Florida Gov. Rick Scott chose the Florida International Academy for their joint announcement is the same reason why the school’s waiting list for seats has more than 200 names.

The school reaches out to an impoverished community, where all students are children of color and nearly all qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and it delivers on results. In 2002, the state of Florida gave the school a failing grade, based on its dismal core performance in reading and writing. Today, that school has an A grade with a nearly identical demographic, and the majority of its students are now meeting high standards in those subjects.

How it got there exemplifies what Rhee and Scott and President Obama and Arne Duncan have been insisting on: Customizing a public education that best meets a child’s needs, and giving disadvantaged children more educational alternatives than they might otherwise have.

For Florida International, that means following the state’s curriculum standards but constantly redesigning the instruction based on its students’ needs, targeting teaching strategies to the individual student, if necessary, and revisiting those strategies every week, according to Principal Sonia Mitchell, who spoke with redefinED Friday. Continue Reading →

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Are choices in education really less palatable than choices in medicine?

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On January 5, 2011 in Customization, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

While newly elected Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s ideas for education have gotten more attention than his ideas for health care, he made during his inaugural speech Tuesday what could be considered an egalitarian argument for choices in medical delivery.

In the same breath that the Republican governor called for the “maximum amount of choice” in education, he demanded that government stop treating patients “like interchangeable parts on an assembly line.”

Specifically:

Patients want to be treated as individuals … choosing their own doctors and making their own decisions in consultation with those doctors … The very wealthy will always have plenty of options. But most Floridians have far too little say in how their children are educated or how health care services are provided.

This speaks to the intriguing intellectual continuum represented in two equally polarizing public policy debates.

There aren’t many people in the mainstream who would quibble with Scott’s call to give low-income families opportunities to choose the right doctor and to make decisions in consultation with those doctors. But in the arena of education those options tend to take on an entirely different character. Though we may feel low-income parents should have the freedom to choose their children’s doctors we are not sure whether that should extend to their children’s schools or teachers.

In virtually every area of life but K-12 education, low-income citizens receiving public support are empowered to choose from government-approved private providers. And that middle ground in health care is generally seen as the nexus in the debate over health care reform. Continue Reading →

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Unions must fear lost membership more than lost teacher tenure

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On December 27, 2010 in Charter Schools, Customization, General, School Choice, Teacher quality, Unionism

Rick Scott will be inaugurated as Florida’s 45th governor in just eight days, following one of the nation’s closest gubernatorial races, and it is worth reflecting on what drove the Florida Education Association to call it “the most important election of our lifetime.” Those who think efforts to reduce tenure and increase merit pay are what will break the unions are missing the most important business ingredient here – market share.

FEA’s preferred candidate for governor, state CFO Alex Sink, lost by only 1.2 percentage points in a Republican landslide that saw the other four statewide Democrats lose by an average of 19 points. In the campaign’s final hectic days, a get-out-the-vote memo to members from my friend Jeff Wright, FEA’s director of public policy advocacy, helped explain the passion. He felt the same pressures I faced when I was a union president. To be a viable business, the union must maintain its membership base. Fewer members means less money and less clout.

“FEA is the only organization that has consistently fought back on stupid policies that do harm to students and to the people we represent,” Jeff wrote. “If we are no longer strong due to reduction in the number of people served by public schools, then they can do what they want with the education budgets of today.”

The flip side is that, when I was a union president, I knew that battles over tenure were great for business. That’s because teacher unions are in the business of selling protection, and anything that causes teachers to experience more job-related fear or insecurity increases union membership. I could never say so publicly, but the elimination of tenure would mean the union contract would be the only protection teachers had. That’s amounts to a full employment act for unions. Continue Reading →

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Bipartisanship over choice is becoming contagious

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On December 18, 2010 in Customization, General, Private Schools, School Choice

Today, redefinED host John Kirtley appears on the St. Petersburg Times’ education blog, the Gradebook, with an essay that showcases the increasing bipartisanship evident in providing school choice for underprivileged students. “For far too long, the important debate over whether we should provide private learning options for low-income schoolchildren has been a source of friction in education circles and partisan combat in political quarters,” Kirtley writes. “But when Oprah Winfrey spotlights the desperate needs of these children and some of the private schools that are turning around their lives, we can safely conclude this issue is now mainstream.”

Kirtley is the chairman of Step Up For Students, a nonprofit group that administers the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students, and he’s currently serving on the education transition team for Florida’s Republican Gov.-elect Rick Scott. In Florida, Republicans control the governor’s mansion and the Legislature, and their voices once stood apart from Democrats in the support over school choice. But times have changed, and now, as Kirtley points out, nearly half the Democrats and the majority of the legislative Black Caucus in Florida support the tax credit scholarship. Continue Reading →

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Rick Scott’s choices erase the traditional lines drawn in public education

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On December 3, 2010 in Customization, General, Parental Choice

Tom Marshall of the St. Petersburg Times wrote this morning that Gov.-elect Rick Scott’s new education transition team in Florida “hints at the ferment under way in public education, as change-minded lawmakers in Tallahassee and Washington consider new ways to boost student performance, improve teacher evaluation and offer new options for families.” He’s right.

Consider me biased, of course, because I am privileged to serve as one of the 18 members. But any education team that includes former D.C. chancellor Michelle Rhee and current Tampa/Hillsborough superintendent MaryEllen Elia is certain to operate from the vantage point that matters most: What do children and their parents need?

Tom’s story is a reminder that the traditional lines are forever blurred in public education. He even notes the partnership between our Tax Credit Scholarship program for 33,000 low-income children and the school district and teachers union for Tampa/Hillsborough, which is the nation’s eighth largest district. We got together to provide better professional education for teachers in both public and private scholarship schools, and the union president, Jean Clements, was graceful in her explanation to reporters: ““This is not a competition. It’s about all of us doing our best to help children who come from very difficult circumstances.” Continue Reading →

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