Daniel TilsonThe excitement so many Florida families feel at the start of a new school year is increasingly tinged, if not outright singed, by burning controversy and conflict over how best to fund, manage and deliver public school education.
Like plenty of parents, I keep concerns about our public schools under my hat, leaving our 8-year-old to worry only about why Dad is so clueless when it comes to things like “decomposing fractions” and other mysteries of third-grade mathematics. After a “Meet The Teacher” Open House last Friday and now the first day of class, she’s just feeling the joy of seeing friends again, and the adrenaline rush of getting back into active student mode.
Me? I’m feeling deeply troubled about the undue pressures being put on schoolteachers, staffs, students, families and public education policy in Florida.
It was with some embarrassed surprise that I found out the other day that my daughter would spend this year in a “portable classroom.” In fact, it turns out two entire grades at her school are housed in long rows of bungalow-style rooms situated between the actual school and its nearby ball fields.
I occasionally walked by them in past years, thinking they were art, music or equipment storage rooms. Oops. Goes to show you, the more questions you ask and the more you know in advance about your kid’s school, the better.
Not that I would have pulled her out of an “A-rated” school with a great principal and staff. And those portable rooms are fine on the inside. But had I known the main school didn’t have space for two entire grades, I would have fought harder for more infrastructure funding.
The whole financing system for our public schools is screwed up. Instead of making corporate tax evaders pay the billions they owe and generating enough revenue to fund public schools fairly and equitably, it’s our local property taxes that are relied on instead.
So, wealthier neighborhoods with higher property values get more funding and better public schools. Even my third-grader can figure that one out.
Meanwhile, we’re almost two decades into a conservative privatization strategy that creates new tax evasion opportunities for big businesses and turns public schools and students into profit streams.
Whether it’s corporations funding vouchers instead of paying taxes, or private corporations profiting from charter schools, the zero sum game is the same.
Corporate, religious and conservative special interests gain billions, and our public schools lose billions. Each time a family buys into the scheme that rhetorically remade the avarice of profit-seeking privatization into the duplicity of “school choice,” another $6,700 or so in public dollars are diverted annually to private enterprise.
That $6,700 figure ranks Florida near the bottom in per-student annual spending nationally. Average teacher salaries are way below average, too.
And starting in 2011 all school and other public employees were forced by Gov. Rick Scott and Republican legislators to give up 3 percent of their annual salary to help fund the state’s pension obligations to them.
Yet there’s plenty of money for new curriculum, testing and online initiatives developed by private, for-profit corporate interests with powerful friends, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
No coincidence that these profit-driven protocols are driving lots of teachers, parents and students batty. No coincidence that they combine with awful laws to “evaluate” teachers and “rate” schools unfairly.
We concerned parents and relatives of Florida schoolchildren: We owe it to them, to ourselves and to the future of our state to seek full understanding of this dangerous sea-change in public education, and then to fight to turn the tide.
Daniel Tilson has a Boca Raton-based communications firm called Full Cup Media, specializing in online video and written content for non-profits, political candidates and organizations, and small businesses. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
