Julie Delegal: Charlie Crist, this education article is for you

Often, I find myself explaining to my public-school advocacy friends that no one can afford to take on Bush-brand education reform and live to get elected.

Barack Obama didn’t even try, and sang Jeb’s praises instead. And, if I’m reading the political landscape correctly, neither will Hillary Clinton, even if she’s called to square off with Bush during the 2016 presidential race.

So I don’t expect you, Gov. Crist, to fight our public-school fight during this gubernatorial campaign. But I do believe you need to know why education advocates are battling so hard for Florida’s public schools.

Bush-branded reform is a platform with a lot of planks: standards-based learning, high-stakes testing, school grades, and privatization. It’s that last one that gives me the most heartburn.

Most Floridians know about public money going to build privately owned assets, i.e., charter schools. Fewer Floridians know, however, that tax money is being diverted to private, voucher-receiving schools, many of them religious schools that teach creationism as science.

Privatization has cost the public schools so much money that our local district superintendent proposed a radical, but ultimately abandoned, public-to-public “open-enrollment” plan to keep students in traditional district schools.

Duval School Board members never got to vote on that plan. Instead, they gave a purely ceremonial thumbs-up to opening more charter schools, as state law says they must. Litigation on this and many other ed-reform issues is pending. In the meantime, charter schools are opening in neighborhoods already replete with excellent, grade-“A” public schools.

Opening new charters means Duval County will be duplicating services in relatively affluent neighborhoods, making it more difficult for excellent public schools to remain excellent public schools.

It’s inefficient; it’s redundant. It’s siphoning money away from our district schools’ scale operations.

As Rep. Mia Jones explained recently on the First Coast Connect radio show, we’ve reached the tipping point: we’re no longer talking about “competition” as a way to benefit public schools (though I don’t concede that privatization has benefitted the public schools). We are at the point now where further unjustified expansion of privatized schools is harming the schools that the vast majority of students attend — Florida’s public schools.

Research tells us that when you consider the socio-economic status of students, traditional public schools outperform charter schools. We don’t have apples-to-apples research on voucher schools in Florida, though. That means that the “choices” that voucher parents are making are, at best, uninformed.

Governor, our public schools still haven’t recovered from the cuts that began as the country slipped into recession in 2008 — though the federal dollars you arranged in 2010 helped to stem the bleeding.

I don’t expect you to take on Gov. Bush’s marquee issue for 2016. But here’s what you can do: you can promise to separate education reform “wheat” from education reform “chaff.” And the way you do that is with unbiased research.

Yes, we need standardized tests, but research says there’s no gain to attaching “high stakes” to them.

Research also says that over time, high-stakes tests are not a reliable indicator of teacher performance. So why do Florida’s teacher evaluations have a 50 percent test-based component?

We don’t yet know what the research says about the Common Core in Florida. Shouldn’t we take a few years to find out before assigning grades to schools based on yet-to-be-validated tests?

You can also require that voucher schools that take public money — before or after it reaches the treasury — participate in the state’s new accountability system. Only then will parents be able to make data-driven choices.

Lastly, you can restore local control to districts to end the opening of superfluous charter schools, as any self-respecting business analyst would.

Acknowledging your predecessor’s education efforts need not conflict with sorting through the consequences of his movement in Florida. Every harvest will have its stones, weeds, and chaff. In Florida, it’s time to take stock of what’s helpful and cultivate it, discard the rest, and spend tax dollars accordingly.

Julie Delegal, a University of Florida graduate, is a contributor for Folio Weekly, Jacksonville’s alternative weekly, and writes for the family business, Delegal Law Offices. She lives in Jacksonville. Column courtesy of Context Florida.