Gee, Jeb!’s education plans are really paying off. College admissions for black students are down, and Florida’s public schools continue to rank among the worst in the country. Why does Jeb! Hate the Florida Constitution?
Florida is failing to meet a constitutional requirement to provide its children with “high quality” education, and the proof can be found in its poor rankings on graduation rates, teacher pay and per-pupil spending, a bipartisan commission said Tuesday.
The Constitutional Accountability Commission was created by the Florida School Boards Association to take a look at a 1998 amendment to the state Constitution that established the unique standard for public schools.
Former Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Democrat, and former Comptroller Bob Milligan, a Republican, chaired the commission and were on hand Tuesday to suggest that more money be spent on schools. They also urged creation of a system that compares Florida’s performance to other states.
……The response from Gov. Jeb Bush’s office: “Florida’s education system is on the right track,” said Bush spokesman Russell Schweiss. “Under the governor, funding for public schools has increased by $6.1-billion and Florida students are reading and performing math at higher levels than ever before.”
Bush has made the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test the centerpiece of his education agenda, but the FCAT does not measure Florida’s achievement against other states. By other measures, Florida continues to rank in the lowest quartile of states on seven of 10 key performance indicators and in the lower half on three out of four funding factors, the commission concluded after a 14-month study.
“We applaud the efforts in Florida, but when you compare against yourself it doesn’t tell you much,” Milligan said.
Among other comparisons:
Florida ranks 48th on per-pupil spending, ahead of only Nevada and Mississippi, according to the latest analysis by Education Week magazine.
–It ranks 30th on teacher pay, at $40,604, more than $5,000 behind Georgia, $6,000 behind the national average and $17,000 behind the leader, California, according to the National Education Association.
–It ranks 48th on graduation rates, according to the most recent figures from the National Center for Education Statistics.
……The rankings don’t matter, said Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, chair of the House Education Council.
“I want to do well, but I’m rejecting this whole idea of rankings as validating where we want to be,” he said. “We don’t need to have a beauty contest.”
Florida is the only state in the nation where voters have approved a constitutional amendment that requires a “high quality system of free public schools,” and makes education “a fundamental value of the state,” the commission noted.
Thin skinned Rep. Dennis Baxley has been in the news lately as a pro-feeding tube, anti-family GOP thug. He’s also been acting as a water boy for David Horowitz’s dishonest drive to fix liberal bias in the nation’s colleges.
Like Horowitz, Baxley is short on actual facts and big on unverifiable anecdotes that he says prove that conservatives face 4 years of bias and ridicule simply for matriculating at a state university.
A few weeks ago, some Baxley claims were shown to be, uh, just a little exaggerated. Actually, the professor who was mentioned came out and called the allegations against him nonsense…
Oh, and if education is a fundamental value, then why aren’t state colleges free to state students? Just wondering.