While the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission will no doubt continue to reshape the campaign finance landscape, a Wall Street Journal report today is a reminder that teacher unions remain very active players. Using information from both U.S. Labor Department and Federal Election Commission reports, the Journal identified $377 million in total political spending by the nation's two top teacher organizations from 2005 to 2011. That's roughly four times the amount previously reported just from FEC records.
Of note to those of us in Florida, the Journal also reported that the Florida Education Association spent $14.7 million over the same period, ranking it behind only teachers unions in California, New York and four other northern states.
The Florida number brings to mind a Florida Times-Union story published last year on the campaign influence of a separate education organization, the American Federation For Children. That story, which is still actively linked by various progressive blogs, made the legitimate point that AFC, a national organization that supports private school options, has been spending money for candidates who feel the same way. The reporter identified $313,757 in Florida campaign contributions since 2007, and singled out Democrats who, as it turns out, had received roughly three-fourths of that total.
What the story and the blog posts have missed is that the AFC money pales in comparison to what FEA spends to influence the process. This is not intended as a criticism of FEA or its investment in the political process, because its members indeed have a profound interest in education policy. But the story carried with it the implication that the Democrats who support private learning options for low-income students are selling out for campaign money. It said as much through how it reported the response of the Democrats: "They say their vote is about bringing choice to districts with poor public schools, not campaign cash." Pointedly, it did not ask the same question of Democrats who oppose private learning options and receive FEA contributions. That question is more than little relevant, given that unions still forcefully oppose any voucher for any child for any reason.
A South Florida progressive blog recently branded any Democrat who votes to give poor children a private learning option a "sellout to the school voucher lobby." Given the striking difference in the financial stakes between the voucher lobby and the FEA lobby, this accusation assumes such a Democrat not only lacks the moral conviction to help poor school children but the political acumen to sell out to the highest bidder.
Editor’s note: Today, we introduce a new feature (even if we’re not sure the name will last) - an occasional compilation of bite-sized nuggets about school choice and education reform that are worth noting but may not be worth a post by themselves.
More anti-Muslim bigotry in school choice debates
It’s nearly impossible to go a month without hearing another example of anti-Muslim bigotry in a school choice debate.
The latest example: Louisiana state Rep. Valarie Hodges, who now says she wishes she had not voted for Gov. Bobby Jindal’s voucher bill because she fears it will promote Islam. “There are a thousand Muslim schools that have sprung up recently,” she said. “I do not support using public funds for teaching Islam anywhere here in Louisiana.”
The lawmaker’s comments echo Muslim bashing in school choice debates in Kansas, Alabama, Tennessee and other places in the past few months alone. Sadly, religious bigotry has long been a part of the school choice narrative. To repeat what we wrote in April:
The courts have ruled that vouchers and tax credit scholarships are constitutional. We live in a religiously diverse society and this pluralism is a source of pride and strength. We can’t pick and choose which religions are acceptable and unacceptable for school choice. And we should not tarnish whole groups of people because of the horrible actions of a few individuals. In the end, expanded school choice will serve the public good. It will increase the likelihood that more kids, whatever their religion, become the productive citizens we all want them to be.
Jeb Bush endorses pro-choice school board candidate
Jeb Bush doesn’t endorse local candidates often. But last week, he decided to back a Tampa Bay-area school board member who openly supports expanded school choice, including vouchers and tax credit scholarships.
Glen Gilzean, 30, is running against four other candidates to keep the Pinellas County School Board seat that Gov. Rick Scott appointed him to in January. The district in play includes much of the city of St. Petersburg and has more black voters than any other.
I don’t know how much Bush’s endorsement will help Gilzean. He's a black Republican in a district that leans Democratic (even if school board races in Florida are officially nonpartisan). But I do know this: Black students in Pinellas struggle more than black students in every major urban school district in Florida, and frustrated black residents are increasingly open to school choice alternatives. (more…)
Media coverage of education reform in Florida never ceases to amaze. What you should be hearing today are the sputtering responses of critics who have drawn widespread media attention in recent weeks with reckless claims that Florida’s ed reforms are an “unmitigated disaster.” Instead ...
The easy prompt for fair and obvious questions was yesterday’s release of the annual “Diplomas Count” report from Education Week. The independent analysis found that between 1999 and 2009, Florida’s graduation rate climbed 18 percentage points – more than all but two states. It also found that Florida’s black and Hispanic students are graduating at rates higher than the national average for like students, which is of no small import for a majority-minority state like Florida. The 2009 rate for Florida’s Hispanic students, in fact, put them at No. 2 among Hispanic students in all 50 states.
So how did the Florida media cover this compelling news? For the most part, it didn’t. (more…)
The unusual logic driving Paul Farhi’s argument that media coverage is biased against traditional public schools has been examined well by several analysts, including Adam Emerson at Choice Words and Alexander Russo at This Week in Education. But as someone who spent 30 years working at newspapers in Florida, I also couldn’t help notice the disconnect with the routine school coverage in local communities.
The conspiracy Farhi sees in coverage of public education ignores the general layout of newsrooms across the country. Newspaper beat structures have historically focused around the local governance of public schools. The school beat, then, is often the School Board beat, and reporters typically spend a good deal of their time at district headquarters, building relationships with school board members, key administrators and teacher representatives in order to keep abreast of important political developments.
One result of this orientation is that even the best reporters tend to view their coverage and appraisal of education issues through the lens of the school district establishment. It’s what they see and hear most days.
So when a superintendent decides in a public school board meeting to brand a tax credit scholarship private learning option as a “travesty,” a beat reporter takes that as a cue to report on a "double standard" that leaves a "huge gap" in the state's accountability system by "largely exempting the scholarship students and the schools they attend from the academic standards that public schools face." When a state education board overturns a school district’s decision to close down a charter school, the Miami Herald school beat reporter writes from the local point of view, seeing the action as “unusual” and a “second chance” for “a school that was closed by the Miami-Dade School Board for questionable spending practices.” When a school district sues the state over whether to allow a new charter school, an Orlando Sentinel beat report captures it as “opening another front in its battle with the state over the prospect of being forced to approve charter schools that it determines are unworthy to open.” (more…)
The Louisiana Senate made national headlines this week with its historic 24-15 vote in favor of a statewide voucher program. But once again, media coverage ignored a key development: The vote was bipartisan.
Seven of 15 Democrats, including four black Democrats, voted in favor of HB 976, which also expanded other school choice options. That's on top of 12 Democrats who voted for the bill in the House. All of them did so despite tremendous pressure not to stray from the traditional party line or from historic allies like the Louisiana teachers union.
Despite all the Democratic votes, the union stuck to the story: The voucher agenda was pushed by out-of-state influences, the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council and Wall Street - a nefarious cabal out to "rob local funds from our neighborhood schools."
Widely repeated lines like these are what prompted redefinED this week to spotlight a couple of Florida folks who support vouchers and tax credit scholarships. One is a St. Petersburg, Fla. pastor who also happens to be a Democrat and the head of the local NAACP. The other is a Sanford, Fla. dad whose podcast interview I posted this morning. "I'm just a dad looking to do the best for his son," Mike Enters told me.
The debate over school choice is more dynamic and nuanced that its loudest critics want you to believe. And it's more interesting than what you'll read in the papers.
I’m not an education reporter anymore, but from my new gig I’m getting even more dizzy watching education evolve. So many states are adding or expanding school choice options – charters, vouchers, virtual schools, tax-credit scholarships – that it’s hard for reporters to keep up. To make it worse, newsrooms are shrinking and there’s more pressure than ever to produce daily stories. It’s really hard to master the wonky details of say, vouchers for special needs students, at the same time you’re covering a middle school brawl and school board sniping.
But reporters are going to have to adapt. They’ll have to cover more ground with more depth.
Readers won’t be well served if education coverage continues to be reflexively focused on traditional public schools. And newspapers’ bottom lines won’t be well served when growing numbers of parents see that their schools are either 1) not being covered or 2) being snared in simplistic story lines that don’t mesh with their realities.
I see plenty of stories that relate to school choice that make me cringe. But I also see some that suggest newsrooms are adjusting: (more…)
Last week, the Tampa Bay Times, the biggest newspaper in Florida, published a front-page story about Jeb Bush's still-substantial influence in Florida education reform. The headline was fair and straightforward -- "Jeb Bush shaping education in Florida" -- but then came the blurb beneath it: "Lawmakers listen. Private and charter schools and online learning benefit."
It sounds provocative, but we think the evidence shows it’s pretty distorted. If you don't believe us, just read the first two paragraphs of the story:
When Sen. David Simmons needed his colleagues' support on the education budget last week, he dropped a powerful name on the Senate floor.
"I had a conversation last week with former Gov. Jeb Bush in which we discussed this and his support of it," Simmons said of the provision to spend $119 million on reading programs at low-income schools.
It’s a little bit baffling how an editor or copy editor could read that lead -- about Bush supporting a big-ticket effort to help struggling readers in public schools -- and then write the aforementioned blurb. But the truth is – and we say this respectfully to our friends in the media -- that kind of thing happens fairly often in reporting about school choice. It feeds a narrative we don’t think is rooted in reality. And we think it's time somebody set the record straight.
Since we call our blog redefinED, it might as well as be us. So, today, we humbly introduce rebuttED, complete with funky new logo!
Behind the silly goat horns, rebuttED is what we're going to tag blog posts that aim to chip away at misinformation circulated by anyone who shapes public opinion about school choice and other aspects of school reform we find critical. It might be a newspaper. It might be a lawmaker. It might be an interest group. (more…)
