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Author

Doug Tuthill

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Doug Tuthill

A lifelong educator and former teacher union president, Tuthill has been president of Step Up For Students since August 2008.

Commentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation LegislationEducation Savings AccountsEducation SpendingFeaturedParental ChoicePrivate School ScholarshipsSchool Choice

Florida Legislature heads into historic session

Doug Tuthill March 2, 2021
Doug Tuthill

The 175-year-old Florida Legislature, which turns 176 on May 26, reconvenes today for its annual 60-day legislative session. The largest global pandemic since 1918 has played havoc with the state’s budget, so money, as usual, will be the dominant issue.

About 85,000 school district students were no-shows this year. The state held school districts harmless and paid them to educate these missing students, but whether taxpayers can afford continuing to do so will be a contentious issue. If the bulk of these students do not return this fall and state government stops funding nonattending students, school districts will be scrambling to reorganize their staffing models, building utilization plans, and budgets.

The federal government is sending billions in education funding to the states via a succession of Covid-19 stimulus bills, but these are one-time payments that should not be used for ongoing expenses, such as employee salaries and benefits. House Speaker Chris Sprowls recently sent a letter to district superintendents warning them against spending non-reoccurring funds on reoccurring expenses.

If the federal government passes another stimulus bill, state government and school districts may find themselves with millions of federal dollars that cannot be spent on pressing needs because the federal money is non-reoccurring. How best to manage this mix of one-time payments with ongoing financial needs will be another contentious issue for legislators to resolve.

The primary education choice bill this session is Senate Bill 48, sponsored by Sen. Manny Diaz Jr., and a priority of Senate President Wilton Simpson. This bill consolidates five education choice programs into two, provides families with greater spending flexibility by turning all the scholarships into Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), stabilizes the programs’ funding, creates growth caps to control expenses, and cleans up a plethora of technical issues that were making the programs overly cumbersome for families and schools.

You can read more about SB 48 here.

Senate staff spent six months working on various aspects of this bill, and it shows. Some of the more nuanced technical solutions are elegant despite the complex legislative language in which they are embedded.

That SB 48 is a Senate bill is unusual. Traditionally, innovative education choice legislation originates in the Florida House and then must navigate its way through the Senate. For the Senate to step up and propose a landmark education choice bill is a pleasant surprise. Once the House’s improvements are included, this will be a historic bill with significant implications for the education choice movement nationally.

The other important education choice bill this session makes dual enrollment programs more accessible to non-school district students. (See here and here.) Legislative changes a few years ago made dual enrollment far less accessible for private school students. Consequently, private school student participation in dual enrollment has been declining. This bill will hopefully fix that problem.

The House has made career planning and workforce development a top priority this session. The pandemic has driven unemployment rates to historic highs and forced millions of people to change jobs and careers. Aligning Florida’s education and training programs with current and future job openings is a critical need the Legislature will be addressing this session. Kudos to the House for taking the lead on this, and to the House staff for working endless hours crafting this legislation.

The House is also promoting legislation that will deliver developmentally appropriate books to the homes of young readers. This program, in concert with the existing Reading ESA for struggling elementary school readers, should help improve many students’ reading skills and, hopefully, inspire a love of life-long reading.

We have all been impacted by this devastating pandemic, but Floridians are resilient, optimistic, and forward looking. We are already on the road to recovery – a recovery I am confident will be accelerated by the decisions our Florida Legislature and governor make over the next 60 days.   

March 2, 2021 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityEducation LegislationEducation Savings AccountsFeaturedParent EmpowermentParental ChoicePrivate School ScholarshipsSchool Choice

Further evidence that Florida’s lower-income students will benefit from access to ESAs

Doug Tuthill February 17, 2021
Doug Tuthill

There are many important policy improvements in Florida Senate Bill 48, the innovative education choice legislation sponsored by Sen. Manny Diaz Jr. that is receiving so much national attention. But my favorite enhancement is the creation of education savings accounts (ESAs) for lower-income families.

This year, Florida is providing scholarships to about 140,000 lower-income families via the Florida Tax Credit (FTC) and Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES) programs. Currently, these scholarships can only be used to pay private school tuition and fees, or transportation costs to attend an out-of-district public school. The scholarship amount cannot exceed the annual cost of tuition and fees at a student’s chosen private school. If a student is eligible for a $7,000 scholarship but the tuition and fees at her private school are $6,000, then that student’s scholarship will be only $6,000.

This year, 17% of our FTC/FES scholarship recipients received scholarships that were, on average, $641 less than a full scholarship. That means 23,800 students, who researchers say are the state’s lowest-income and lowest-performing students when they receive a scholarship, did not get $15,255,800 in scholarship funds they were financially eligible to receive.

If the Florida Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis agree to turn these scholarships into ESAs, then every scholarship student will receive the full scholarship amount, and any funds not spent on tuition and fees may be spent on additional education services and products such as tutoring, books, summer school, and software.

Some private and charter schools already are planning to create afterschool tutoring and summer enrichment programs to serve families with excess ESA funds. Families also may use ESA funds to purchase services from their neighborhood district schools and certified teachers who create their own afterschool and summer programs. More small business development, especially in lower-income urban communities, is a benefit of the enhanced spending flexibility families have via ESAs.

An important feature of ESAs is that unspent funds roll over so parents may spend them in future years. Some elementary and middle school families, for instance, probably will roll over unused ESA funds to help pay for high school expenses, which are often unaffordable for scholarship families.

Sen. Diaz’s bill is a long way from becoming law. But Florida’s legislative leaders, in collaboration with our governors over the last 25 years, have made steady progress toward providing our state’s most disadvantaged students with more effective and efficient learning options.

I am confident that the education choice bills that become law this summer will continue this trend.

February 17, 2021 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityEducation LegislationEducation Savings AccountsFeaturedFlorida Tax Credit ScholarshipParent EmpowermentParental ChoiceSchool Choice

Much to celebrate in Florida as school choice is recognized nationwide

Doug Tuthill January 25, 2021
Doug Tuthill

Last year at this time, hundreds rallied at the Florida Capitol for expansion of the Gardiner Scholarship program. New legislation introduced last week would allow families in all state scholarship programs to have flexible spending accounts, currently available only to students enrolled in that program.

National School Choice Week kicked off Sunday and will continue through this Saturday. This year’s celebration is especially meaningful for Step Up For Students given it coincides with our 20th anniversary of serving disadvantaged students and their families.

Over the last 20 years, Step Up has raised about $5 billion in scholarship funds and funded over 1 million tax credit scholarship students. To impact this many lives has been an extraordinary honor. But we have lots more work to do.

Last week, state Sen. Manny Diaz, Jr. filed a bill that will streamline Florida’s education choice programs and give families more flexibility in how they spend their scholarship funds. The pandemic has caused all families to search for ways to keep their children safe while also meeting their academic needs. Many affluent families have organized innovative solutions such as homeschool cooperatives, micro-schools, and hybrid programs that combine virtual and face-to-face instruction, while most families with less resources have not had these opportunities.

Sen. Diaz’s bill will help address this inequity by empowering lower-income families to have better access to these more diverse teaching and learning options, including out-of-school learning options that are another source of public education’s growing inequality of opportunity.  

As a former public-school teacher and teacher union leader, I am pleased by how Florida’s education choice movement is expanding opportunities for teachers to innovate and be entrepreneurial. Unlike doctors, lawyers, architects, accountants and other professionals, educators have few opportunities to take a path less traveled and do their own thing.

Because families do not control their public education dollars, they cannot choose to spend these dollars at schools that are owned and operated by teachers. This makes it difficult-to-impossible for teachers to create schools that are financially viable. But as the education choice movement gives families more control over their children’s public education dollars, teacher owned and operated schools will become viable and teachers will begin to have the same opportunities as other professionals.

With all these new opportunities for teachers and families come new responsibilities. We have historically implemented accountability in public education through government regulations, but as families and teachers are empowered to have more choices, finding the proper balance between regulatory and consumer choice accountability will be increasingly important.

Providing families with the information they need to match their children with the education programs that best meet their social, emotional and academic needs also becomes more important as families have access to more choices. Human development is a complex process. Ensuring families continually have all the information and support they need to help their children successfully navigate this process is essential.

Step Up currently runs the nation’s largest Education Savings Account (ESA) program. Consequently, we are well aware of the challenges associated with running ESA programs effectively and efficiently. If Sen. Diaz’s bill passes as currently written, Step Up will be managing well over 200,000 ESAs this fall. We know that the country’s education choice movement will be significantly impacted by how well we manage this task.

Education choice is the future of the school choice movement. We will know the education choice movement has reached maturity when National School Choice Week is renamed National Education Choice Week. That day is coming — sooner than most people think.

January 25, 2021 1 comment
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Commentary and OpinionCustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedMagnet SchoolsParental ChoicePublic School ChoiceSchool ChoiceUnionism

Black students need empowerment and support, not white paternalism

Doug Tuthill September 4, 2020
Doug Tuthill

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board decision and the 1968 conflict between the white New York City teachers union and the Black Ocean Hill-Brownsville community were historic events. Together they helped make well-intentioned white paternalism the primary way public education has related to Black students and their families for the last 50-plus years.

Black families and their children have not been well served by this paternalism. It is time we replace white paternalism with Black empowerment.

The Brown decision did not empower Black families to have more control over how their children are educated. Instead, it further empowered white paternalism. The court told white school boards to stop racially segregating their school buildings in the hope that Black children would benefit from sitting next to white children. Most white school boards delayed as long as possible, but by the late-1960s they were under intense legal pressure to desegregate.

In response to this ongoing legal pressure and the political opposition of white families to forced bussing, districts began implementing magnet programs in the late 1970s and early ’80s to encourage white families to voluntarily desegregate their school buildings. Magnet schools are high-quality, well-funded specialized programs that districts create in Black community schools to attract white students.

Magnet schools are a win-win solution for white families and school districts. Advantaged white children receive even more advantages, and white school boards have numbers showing their school buildings are integrated. The only losers are Black students who seldom benefit from these high-quality programs while being used as statistical props by school districts. 

(Full disclosure: I helped start Florida’s first International Baccalaureate program in 1984, which was a magnet program designed to appease politically influential white families while satisfying a federal desegregation order.)

White liberal families are especially attracted to magnet programs because they enable these families to tell their likeminded friends that their children are enrolled in integrated public schools. What usually goes unsaid is that within these integrated buildings their children are attending elite programs with entrance requirements that often lead to racial and economic segregation.

White paternalism and Black disempowerment were further enhanced by a political confrontation in New York City. In 1968, all New York City schools were controlled by a Central School Board that was uninterested in integrating the school system. As their frustration grew, Ocean Hill- Brownsville families and community leaders decided the best way to meet their children’s needs was to assert greater control over their local schools. The city’s teachers union saw decentralizing control of the city’s schools as an existential threat to their business model, which requires a centralized, command-and-control management system to enable collective bargaining.

The union went on strike for 36 days, crushed the Black community’s struggle for self-determination, and reaffirmed some enduring precedents. Public education would continue to be controlled by white power, Black communities would continue to be disempowered, and white power would make good-faith efforts to educate Black children, provided all aspects of white privilege were protected—particularly relating to teachers unions.  

(Full disclosure: I am the former president of two local teachers unions.)

The disempowerment of Black families and their reliance on white paternalism to meet their children’s learning needs is still the dominant reality in public education today. And it is still the prevailing philosophy of my political party (i.e., Democrats). But there are hopeful signs that enlightened progress may be possible.

Serial and The New York Times recently published a five-episode podcast, titled “Nice White Parents,” that documents the inability of well-intentioned white paternalism to improve the schooling of Black children. In a follow-up piece called “How White Progressives Undermine School Integration,” the Times interviewed progressives about the appropriateness of the current racial and economic power relationships in public education.  

Times reporter Eliza Shapiro introduced these interviews by stating that, “across America, desegregation has never been tried at scale, partly because of resistance from white liberals.” Shapiro also stated the importance of focusing “on empowering Black and Latino parents who have so often been left out of the debate about their own children’s educations.”

Here are some representative quotes from Shapiro’s interviews.

Chana Joffe-Walt, the lead reporter on the Nice White Parents series: “I walked through the history of a school where integration has been invoked over and over again as a virtue, and used as a reason to pursue policies and programs that benefit white parents, that benefit advantaged parents — and that didn’t actually shift power within the school….it is more important to talk about race and power in more explicit terms, and to talk about this history.”

Sonya Douglass Horsford, professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College: “The focus needs to be shifting, for those who are focused on justice, from equity to emancipation. That means for students of color, for immigrant students, for others who have been marginalized in the U.S. school system, to recognize the system that they’re in and to begin to think about ways to liberate themselves from that.”

Richard Buery, president of a charter school network: “In this city, it’s always integration on white people’s terms…Racial oppression is obviously not new, including in schools, which were in so many ways designed to be the instruments of oppression.”

That the New York Times is willing to publish comments questioning the ability of white liberal paternalism to delivery greater equity and excellence in public education is a hopeful sign. But the paternalistic relationship between Black families and public education that the Brown decision and the 1968 New York City teachers’ strike further institutionalized has served white families and teacher unions well and will be difficult to change.  

Replacing systemic white paternalism with the empowering of Black families is a necessary but not sufficient condition for improving Black student achievement. We also need to implement the support systems these families need to exercise this empowerment as effectively as possible. This is an area where well-intentioned white liberalism can be helpful. Liberation, empowerment, self-determination, and appropriate support is a formula that will help public education achieve more equity and excellence.

September 4, 2020 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionCourse ChoiceCustomizationEducation ChoiceFeaturedHomeschoolingMicroschoolsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

The 1960s leftist rationale for education choice is rising from the dead

Doug Tuthill September 2, 2020
Doug Tuthill

As I talk with parents and educators who are struggling to create safe and effective learning options for their students, I’m taken with how many are revisiting the left-wing education reformers of the 1960s. Names like John Holt, Ivan Illich, A.S. Neill, and Paulo Freire are coming up so often that it feels like I’m back in graduate school.

It appears the 1960s leftist rationale for education choice is making a comeback.

A student columnist at my high school newspaper in 1971 introduced me to the radical ideas of educator John Holt.  Holt inspired me to make improving public education my life’s work.

After working as an elementary and middle school teacher in the 1950s, Holt concluded that schools undermined children’s natural desires to learn, so he began promoting a form of homeschooling he called unschooling. Holt described the relationship between unschooling and student learning in his two most famous books, “How Children Fail” (1964), and “How Children Learn” (1967).

Unschooling aims to tap into children’s natural curiosity and desire to learn through authentic life experiences. Holt saw schools as artificial environments that undermine children’s natural desires to learn through exploration and play. Some of the current surge in homeschooling and micro-schools reflects Holt’s idea that learning should occur in more natural environments.

A recent New York Times column on educating children during this pandemic referred to the recent growing popularity of Ivan Illich’s concept of deschooling. Like Holt, Illich also felt that schools were artificial environments that stifled children’s innate desires to explore and learn. As the Times columnist observed:

“Deschooling’s core principles — that education should be self-directed rather than compulsory, that human growth and curiosity cannot be quantified and that children learn best in natural environments and mixed-age groups — have gained some recognition in recent years. But the idea of truly communitarian, noncompulsory, family-centered approaches to education were largely limited to the radical fringe of pedagogy. A lot has changed in six months.”

A.S. Neill’s 1960 book, “Summerhill,” is enjoying renewed popularity with families creating learning pods, micro-schools, and homeschool cooperatives. Consistent with Holt and Illich, Neill believed education should be centered on each child’s innate internal motivation to explore and learn. He created the Summerhill School in England to implement his beliefs that schooling should be less coercive and more democratic and child centered. Neill believe that schooling should be customized to fit the child instead of molding the child to fit the school.

Many education reformers today were directly or indirectly influenced by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. His 1968 book, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” was, and continues to be, must reading for anyone wanting to understand the politics of government-mandated education. While Holt, Illich, and Neill wrote about how the coercive and stressful nature of schooling negatively impacts students, Freire built on this analysis to explain how governments often use schools as instruments of social control and political oppression.

Freire promoted a liberation or critical pedagogy that empowers students and families to take control of their education and use it to attain greater political and economic freedom. While most parents exercising education choice today have not read Freire’s work, their motivations for asserting greater control over their child’s education increasingly reflect Freire’s ideas on the dangers of centralized, command and control public education systems.

Like many education choice advocates, I support the more democratic, child-centered approach to education that Holt, Illich, Neill, Freire, and others were promoting in the 1960s. But scaling up an education system capable of meeting the unique needs of each child is a daunting task, which is why most schools today still employ a one-size-fits-all, assembly line approach to teaching and learning.

This horrific pandemic has given families and micro-communities a unique opportunity to assume more control over how their children are educated. We need to give these families and their communities the support they need to be successful. Perhaps the hopes of the 1960s idealists will be realized and a more natural, child-centered way of educating our children will soon become the new norm.

September 2, 2020 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19CustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceFeaturedHomeschoolingMicroschoolsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

How should state and local officials regulate parent teachers?

Doug Tuthill August 20, 2020
Doug Tuthill

Stephanie Conner uses a Florida education savings account for students with special needs to provide a combination of educational services — therapy, homeschool, private school — for her son Eli, foreground. PHOTO: Lance Rothstein

State and local officials in Florida are discussing how to best regulate parents who are facilitating learning pods, homeschooling cooperatives and micro-schools that satisfy Florida’s mandatory school attendance law. For the last 175 years, the distinction between parents and public-school teachers was clear. But COVID-19 has muddied the waters.

In the last six months, public and private schooling has merged with homeschooling, with parents doing much of the teaching. As schools open this fall, parents will continue to be the primary schoolteacher for millions of K-12 students. How should state and local governments regulate these parent teachers?

Let’s start with the unprecedented unbundling of education services. Instead of getting all their services from a single provider — their assigned neighborhood school — parents are increasingly accessing education services from multiple providers. The unbundling of childcare from academic instruction is the best example. For the first time in at least 150 years, most students will not receive their childcare services from their academic instructional provider this fall. Many parents are providing childcare at home while their students receive online instruction. Other parents are paying Boys and Girls Clubs, YMCAs, municipal community centers and other parents to provide childcare.

Many of these childcare providers are also providing education support services, such as in-person tutoring that complements online instruction. This is especially true when the online instruction is asynchronous. These latter situations provide state and local regulators with interesting challenges, because these childcare providers are also teaching.

Florida state law regulating private school employees serving scholarship students requires “each employee and contracted personnel with direct student contact, upon employment or engagement to provide services, to undergo a state and national background screening … An ‘employee or contracted personnel with direct student contact’ means any employee or contracted personnel who has unsupervised access to a scholarship student for whom the private school is responsible.”

This background check requirement makes sense for any childcare provider who is supervising children from multiple families. A parent who is leading a 10-student homeschool cooperative or micro-school should be required to pass a background screening.

Private school teachers are not required to have a state teaching certificate. This also seems appropriate for homeschool cooperative and micro-school parent teachers.

Whether a homeschool cooperative or a micro-school is receiving public funding should have no impact on how the parent teachers are regulated. All instruction that is satisfying a state’s mandatory attendance laws should be held to a same standard — background checks but no certification requirements.

We will never go back to the pre-pandemic public education system. Diversity, flexibility, and customization will be much bigger components of schooling moving forward. We need to quickly and thoughtfully adjust our policy infrastructure to support this new normal.

August 20, 2020 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionCommon GroundCoronavirus / COVID-19Education and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityEducation Savings AccountsFeaturedSchool Choice

The evolving public education market

Doug Tuthill August 6, 2020
Doug Tuthill

An education savings account ensures that Anna Ragusa of North Carolina can continue to receive needed therapies during social distancing.

Public education has historically been a poorly managed, underperforming market. The pandemic is driving changes that could, over time, lead to market improvements that will benefit families, students, educators and the public.

In effective and efficient markets, consumers control their purchasing power, monopolies do not exist, the barriers to entry and exit are appropriate (i.e., not too high or too  low), information needed to make good decisions is available to suppliers and customers, and the public good is well served.

None of these features exist in public education today. About 90 percent of public education services are controlled by a single supplier – government. This market domination constitutes a monopoly. Almost all purchasing power is controlled by government.

When families have no control over their public education dollars, new suppliers are discouraged from entering the market. That’s because most families cannot afford to pay both school district taxes and the cost of education services from non-government suppliers. This barrier to entry is why there has been so little supplier diversity and innovation in K-12 education over the last 170 years. Giving families control over their education dollars would unleash demand and create a market that would attract more suppliers.

While the availability of information in public education has gotten better over the last 25 years, families and schools still lack the quality and quantity of information they need to make good decisions. These market flaws are causing taxpayers to get a poor return on their investments in public education.

Some of these market deficiencies are starting to be addressed as families respond to the pandemic by asserting more control over their children’s education. Affluent families are using their own funds to create and access alternative schooling models, including micro-schools, homeschooling cooperatives and pandemic pods. And a few governors are using federal stimulus dollars to fund scholarships so low-income families may have these same opportunities.

 If this trend continues and more families gain greater control over their public education dollars, the barriers to entry for new, more diverse suppliers will be lowered and the creativity and innovation we are starting to see will increase. Using Education Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) to give families more flexibility over how they spend their public education funds will also open the market to providers such as tutors, counselors and therapists.

 In healthy markets, more desirable supply attracts more consumers, which then attracts even more desirable supply, which then attracts even more consumers. This type of virtuous market cycle is emerging in a few communities and could start to erode the government’s monopoly on supply and further the development of a healthy public education market.

 The unbundling of education services will also accelerate the improvement of a better public education market. Government has historically used its monopoly to force parents to access all their education services from a single provider (e.g., the neighborhood public school). While the unbundling of these services has been occurring slowly over the last three decades as families increasingly use programs such as virtual schools and dual enrollment, the pandemic is encouraging suppliers to accelerate this unbundling.

 Some private schools are offering childcare services for families who want to access a virtual instructional program but need out-of-home childcare. Some school districts are providing breakfast and lunch programs for low-income families who are homeschooling. And some community organizations are providing extracurricular activities, such as theatre and sports programs, that are no longer available at some neighborhood schools.

 We have almost two centuries of data showing that a dysfunctional public education market is not capable of delivering systemwide excellence and equity. The work required to develop the infrastructure necessary to support an effective and efficient public education market is daunting. But this horrific pandemic has provided us an historic opportunity we should not let pass.

August 6, 2020 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionCustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation LegislationEducation Savings AccountsFeaturedSchool Choice

Is it time for Blueprint 2030?

Doug Tuthill July 28, 2020
Doug Tuthill

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush signed into law in 1999 the A+ Plan for education calling for greater school and teacher accountability eight years after his predecessor signed the Education Reform and Accountability Act.

In 1991, the Florida Legislature passed, and Gov. Lawton Chiles signed, Blueprint 2000: The Education Reform and Accountability Act. The purpose of Blueprint 2000 was to restructure how Florida’s public education system was managed.

In the late 1980s, Florida was a national leader in experimenting with teacher empowerment and site-based decision making (SBDM). The SBDM movement sought to transfer more decision-making power to schools in exchange for these schools being held more accountable for results. Blueprint 2000 was designed to create a state policy infrastructure that would institutionalize SBDM across all of Florida’s public schools.

Legislative and executive branch leaders, all of whom were Democrats, thought Florida’s public schools were underperforming because they were being micromanaged. Blueprint 2000 was going to change that.

I was one of four teacher union representatives on the state commission appointed in 1991 to develop the Blueprint 2000 implementation plan. In collaboration with the Florida Department of Education and thousands of educators, parents, business leaders, and other citizens, we created new state curriculum standards, a new state assessment system called the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), established School Advisory Councils (SACs) at every public school, and required schools to implement annual School Improvement Plans (SIPs). We failed to reach consensus on how best to hold public schools accountable for results, a failure Jeb Bush fixed when he became governor in 1998.

Next spring will be Blueprint 2000’s 30-year anniversary. Florida’s public education system has made great improvements using the education reform and accountability infrastructure that sprang from Blueprint 2000. But that infrastructure has aged. Florida’s public education system needs a new blueprint. It is time for Blueprint 2030.

The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing educators and parents to innovate at a pace never before seen in public education. In the period of a month last spring, every district, private, and charter school campus closed and every student became a homeschool student. When school begins this fall, families will choose from a variety of instructional models, including on-campus, virtual, hybrid (i.e., a combination of on-campus and virtual) and homeschooling. In coming years, families will have access to even more choices.  

State government has waived a variety of state laws and regulations to allow schools and families to adjust to this new normal. But these waivers are temporary solutions. Our state leaders need to start developing a new public education infrastructure, and Blueprint 2000 provides an approach they could consider emulating.

Similar to what the Florida Legislature did in 1991, the 2021 legislature could pass legislation establishing a commission to develop recommendations for creating a new public education infrastructure. This new infrastructure should be designed to support a more diverse and flexible public education system, one capable of meeting the unique needs of each student.  

The largest task for this commission would be improving Florida’s antiquated public education funding system. This funding system is hostile to systemic innovation and the flexibility needed to meet each student’s needs.

The state has created flexible spending accounts for some students with unique abilities/special needs. About 16,000 families will use this spending flexibility this fall to customize their child’s education. Providing all families with access to flexible public education funds is necessary if all children are to benefit from a customized education program.

We also need to reinvent our state assessment and assessment data systems.  As students increasingly receive publicly-funded instruction from multiple providers (tutors, virtual school, college via dual enrollment and assigned neighborhood school) we will need to assess the progress students are making with each provider, aggregate their achievement data, and properly share students’ data with those providers.

We also will need to institutionalize better processes for helping families and students pick the most appropriate providers. Well over 10,000 providers are eligible to serve the 16,000 unique abilities/special needs students using flexible spending accounts, often called Education Scholarship Accounts (ESAs). Deciding which of these 10,000 providers is the best fit for a specific learning need is a daunting task.

A Blueprint 2030 commission will have a huge job helping state government, school districts, schools and other education providers create the infrastructure necessary to support an effective and efficient post-pandemic public education system. We are never going back to the pre-pandemic education system.

Planning for the future should begin soon.

July 28, 2020 0 comment
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