Sunday begins National School Choice Week, the annual seven-day period in the middle of winter when kids all over the country dream of either: (1) having the freedom to stay home from school on account of snow, or (2) moving to Florida.
Well, actually, kids dream of those things all the time. But their parents ought to spend this week dreaming of Florida because the Sunshine State now boasts some of the most forward-looking school choice policies in the country.
In fact, last year a remarkable bipartisan coalition – which included most of Florida’s black and Hispanic state legislators – passed a major expansion of the Sunshine State’s landmark Tax Credit Scholarship Program. This prompted The Wall Street Journal to marvel at “Florida’s Unheralded School Revolution.”
And last year, not coincidentally, Florida’s student achievement test scores continued to rise, catapulting the Sunshine State into the nation’s Top Five states in K-12 education, according to the American Legislative Exchange Council’s annual rankings. (Not bad for a state that used to place in the bottom third of annual student achievement rankings.)
While there is much to celebrate in the Sunshine State’s schools, Florida still has its share of education policy problems. For example, last year Florida’s politically-opportunistic former Governor (Charlie Crist) decided to curry favor with the powerful teachers’ unions by vetoing a merit pay for teachers’ bill that he had previously pledged to sign.
Crist’s political strategy ultimately backfired – he got trounced by Marco Rubio in the U.S. Senate race. Yet, interestingly, his flip-flop on merit pay would not have even won Crist the 2010 prize for Most Unseemly Behavior by a Floridian in the merit pay debate.
That dubious honor, sadly, would have gone to a government teacher at East Ridge High School in Clermont who sent the Florida Senate President a packet of nearly 100 letters – all of them opposing merit pay for teachers – which his students had written as a class assignment. In a cover letter, the teacher claimed that he had presented the bill (S.B. 6) to the students with “a neutral connotation.” And the teacher also expressed “total amazement” that every single one of his students wrote a letter opposing merit pay.
Yet, included in the packet – no doubt by accident – was the teacher’s actual assignment, which included “talking points” against S.B. 6 that had been copied from a memo (also enclosed) written from the teachers unions’ perspective. No arguments in support of S.B. 6 were included with the assignment. So, it was no great surprise that the students’ letters echoed the arguments found in the union’s “talking points” memo – sometimes word-for-word.
Now, it would be grossly unfair to suggest that this unscrupulous teacher is somehow representative of all those who oppose merit pay. He isn’t. But it would be equally misleading for someone to claim that the Florida Education Association actually represents the interests of all Florida teachers – or, especially, all of Florida’s best and brightest teachers – when it lobbies against merit pay and other education reform initiatives.
What this story illustrates is that even in a state like Florida, where a broad bipartisan coalition is making extraordinary strides in improving public education, all sorts of problems in the classroom can arise. And when such problems arise – or better yet, before such problems arise – parents need to have an array of good educational options so that they can ensure that their children are being taught by teachers who merit their trust.
That’s why we need school choice in America. And why we need to spend National School Choice Week urging policymakers to help turn this dream into reality.
William Mattox is a resident fellow with the James Madison Institute, a public policy think tank in Tallahassee, Florida.
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