Recently the Florida House passed HB 7037, a bill to
increase funding for the construction of charter schools and to decrease the
penalties for not adhering to the class size amendment. If this bill becomes law, there will be
devastating consequences for public schools.
Charter schools are publicly funded schools run for
profit. More and more frequently, these
schools use public funds to secure real estate.
The basic ploy is to open as a publicly funded charter school and
operate for a few years. The emphasis is
not on providing a sound education, because educating students is not the
goal. The goal is to solicit and secure
public monies in the name of education, buy real estate with those funds, and
then become owners of the property when the school fails. In the charter school business model, the
goal is to fail.
This new proposal by the Florida House earmarks 40 percent
of a district’s construction funding to be diverted to the construction of new
charters. What this means for public
schools is that the budgets for building and improving schools in that district
will come to a screeching halt. The
school I currently work in, for example, is over 50 years old and continues to
operate in spite of its condition rather than in conjunction with the environment
it provides. While all of the schools
in this district will continue to age and deteriorate, the money for
improvements will become less available.
Charters, however, will be pristine beacons to parents concerned about
sending their kids to shoddy schools in decline.
Furthermore, the budgets in my district are in
disarray. Taking money out to fund
charters will further burden a district in distress. Teachers haven’t seen any significant pay
raise in six years and are losing incentive to stick around. Nothing is being done to lure quality college
grads to replace retiring veteran teachers with incalculable experience. Allocations are being cut due to the monetary
shortfalls and there should be no surprise that the first classes to be cut are
resource and elective classes. Students
are losing their art and music teachers in the name of fiscal conservatism
while charters are opening in those same neighborhoods offering performing arts
curriculum. It’s highly unlikely that
this is a convenient coincidence for educational profiteers.
As funding for teacher allocations and pay becomes
increasingly enfeebled by deliberate politics, classes become overburdened and
overpopulated. The House is responding
to this problem by relaxing the penalties for breaking the class-size
amendment. On one hand they cut and
burden school district budgets while on the other they pretend to ease the
impact of deliberately exceeding class sizes.
Again, it doesn’t take much to see that parents of kids in schools with
large classes will choose to send them to charters that seemingly offer
educational paradise.
And that has to be the reality of these bills because there
is nothing educationally sound in increasing class sizes. Even the most cursory look at increasing
class sizes would reveal that a teacher would have more papers to grade and
would therefore be more limited in providing timely and effective feedback,
especially in districts with mandatory academy and professional learning
community meetings that take away two days a week of after school planning and
grading time. If a teacher can’t grade
and return papers in a timely manner, there is little he/she can do to diagnose
and remedy student weaknesses.
Furthermore, teachers are less able to meet with identified struggling
students on a one on one basis because of the sheer numbers of kids in the
classroom. This is not to mention the
higher incidences of classroom disruptions, misbehaviors, or distractions that
come with more bodies in the room. The
class size adjustments have nothing to do with education and everything to do
with dollars. Not dollars for the public
school district but rather dollars for the charters to build alluring new
facilities, to offer smaller class sizes, and to provide the courses no longer
offered by the public schools.
Couple this legislation with previous mandates requiring
students to take at least one online course as a graduation mandate and you
technically prevent any school from having all of its students considered full-time
when it comes to “FTE” (full-time equivalent) numbers. Schools are funded based upon the number of
students enrolled and when a student takes an online course that school loses
out on funding. Further that by adding
computer based “grade recovery” courses and some students are only at any
particular school for half a day. There
is no limit to how many courses a student can retake on the computer and with
graduation rate being a major player in the determination of school grades,
school administrators allow students into grade recovery courses
magnanimously.
Ultimately, if all of this isn’t enough to make one turn a
suspicious eye toward these backwards republican polices then the bill to
replace the FHSAA allowing for high school athlete “free agency” surely
will. What legitimate incentive do
legislators have to allow students to choose what school they choose to play
sports for? Would a superior athlete
attend a charter without a sports team?
Probably not. Would that same
athlete attend the shiny new charter school if allowed to play sports at any
other school of his/her choosing? Much more
likely.
Currently, great people are doing miraculous things in spite
of the obstacles thrown into their paths in countless classrooms in our
district schools. But as the obstacles continually
increase in both numbers and severity, it’s becoming increasingly arduous for
successes to occur in the public schools.
The students aren’t failing. The
teachers aren’t failing. The uninformed
populace is failing to elect responsible candidates who represent the people rather
than the chamber of commerce. If this
trend continues there will be no more community schools with student interests
at heart, there will just be real estate moguls and profiteers exploiting children
in the name of profits.
