BlogWood: MT Archives

Jeb! flip flops; FLA children left behind

Now that his brother has ascended once more to the throne, Jeb! feels safe to get back to business as usual. This is Jeb! in March:

Is Jeb! trying to engineer an excuse not to do the voter mandated Pre-K thing this year? We know how he just hates voter initiatives that force him to spend money on people’s needs. Of course, he could just be engaging in a little disingenuous election-year grandstanding:

Gov. Jeb Bush said Monday that a House bill's proposed standards for a statewide prekindergarten program fall short of what he would like to see.

"I'm not going to sign a bill into law that from the very beginning sends the wrong signal about the importance of literacy," Bush said after visiting an elementary school in Orlando.

Asked if he thought the House bill was below the level of standards he wanted, he said, "Yep."

And this is Jeb! now:

Less than two weeks before Florida lawmakers try to craft a universal pre-kindergarten program, top Republican lawmakers and Gov. Jeb Bush have finally worked out key details that appear to water down the higher standards once espoused by Bush and his administration.

In fact, Jeb! went so far as to veto the legislation that was sent to him in the summer, claiming that it did not provide for a high enough quality pre-k experience.

Now, the bill he vetoed was pretty inadequate, but it was crafted by a GOP dominated Jeb! friendly legislature, so he could have gotten a good bill if he had cared. The veto allowed Jeb! to say that he really really cares about kids, and that high standards are the new minimum, and it allowed legislators to say that they had really really tried to pass a pre-k thing. Everybody wins.

Well, everybody except the thousands of Florida children that are being left behind. The new proposal looks about as weak as last year’s bill. I’m not sure if it’s better than nothing, though I suppose it would at least provide a few hours of overcrowded daily babysitting. (back to Herald article)

Under the tentative agreement, the state would agree to pay for only three hours of instruction each day, oversight of the program would be split between two separate state agencies, schools would have years to comply with teacher-training requirements and there would be ''flexibility'' on the student-to-teacher ratio.

The recommendations are a shadow of those promulgated earlier this year by a Bush-appointed pre-K advisory panel, chaired by Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings. The panel wanted a minimum of four hours of instruction a day. Also, Bush this summer vetoed legislation passed by the Legislature, saying it did not meet the ''high quality'' standards called for by the constitutional amendment that voters passed in 2002 creating the pre-K program.
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Bush, meanwhile, recently reauthorized his state-of-emergency powers, which give him authority to spend money with little legislative oversight in the wake of the four storms.
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In his veto message earlier this year, however, Bush wanted oversight of the pre-kindergarten program by the state Department of Education. Instead, the new legislation will place some control in the Agency for Workforce Innovation. The Department of Education will be in charge of crafting a test to measure what childen learned in the pre-K program.

I thought that emergency powers bit was kinda interesting...