Time Out, Florida’s Ball

For Folio Weekly, November 9, 2009 edition

Re-pubished on JaxPoliticsOnline.com with permission of Folio Weekly, all rights reserved

“… I need to make it clear that I do not believe that the Budget appropriately and adequately funds a high quality education for every student in Florida.”

These words appeared in a six-page indictment of Florida’s public schools, a letter directed last month to Florida Education Commissioner Dr. Eric Smith. The words might have been written by any number of education advocates — parents, teachers, school board members — advocates who show up to speak at rallies protesting the legislature’s perennial fiscal neglect of the needs of Florida’s public schools.

But these words come from deep within the inner sancta of the conservative Tallahassee establishment. The letter’s author is Board of Education member Roberto Martinez, a Coral Gables attorney who served as general counsel to Gov. Jeb Bush during Bush’s first year as governor. Martinez also served as special counsel to Gov. Charlie Crist, through the Florida Attorney General’s Office. In the letter, Martinez relates his discovery that Florida’s public school system is “a hodgepodge of both quality and funding.” He finds that Florida’s public school teachers are “significantly underpaid.” Martinez goes on to indict the legislative budget process that currently funds education, saying that “[t]he current system is unsustainable.” He calls for an analysis of what works and what doesn’t, and says we must create a broader revenue base. Martinez says that means taking a good, hard look at sales tax exemptions.

Mr. Martinez’s letter was recently intercepted by his longtime legal colleague and across-the-aisle political acquaintance, state Sen. Dan Gelber. Gelber, a public education advocate from Miami Beach, is now running for Florida Attorney General. Gelber has promised that, if elected, he’ll sue the Florida Legislature for failing to execute its single constitutionally paramount duty: to adequately fund high quality public education. Gelber has hit the campaign trail with Martinez’s letter in hand. But Duval County School Board Chairman Tommy Hazouri bristled at the notion that Martinez’s written insider indictment should in any way be construed as “news.”

“What do they expect when they’re giving away $20 billion in tax breaks?” Hazouri roars. “When they’re putting more money into building prisons than into building schools?”

“It shouldn’t be ‘news’ to anyone.” Hazouri, obviously agitated, continues. “[The letter] tells me that they’re just now beginning to recognize what’s been happening for the past 10 years — before the economy ever went south,” Hazouri says, referring to draconian cuts to public education that necessitated drastic reductions in Duval’s district budget. Duval made an 11 percent across-the-board cut in district staff this past year, in a county that is struggling with a staggering 34 percent high school non-completion rate.

“You’ve got Charlie Crist running around bragging about Florida having the lowest tax burden in the country. What does that say? It says, ‘You’re not funding something.’”

Hazouri’s voice resonates among a growing statewide chorus of education advocates -- and he’s not impressed that the conservatives are finally beginning to sing along. These are, after all, the same cadre of people who have shamelessly used education as a political football to get themselves elected. A decade ago, on his way to the Governor’s mansion, Jeb Bush peddled a two-pronged education policy: create a high-stakes testing scheme for public schools, while creating a funding source for vouchers for private schools, which, by the way, would be exempt from said high-stakes testing.

The problem, according to Gelber, is that conservatives shrewdly conflated the debate about public school funding with a debate about public school accountability, when, in truth, these are two separate issues. The fact that the accountability mantra drowned out any attempt to discuss funding deficits made the resulting debate “utterly foolish,” Gelber said during a recent phone interview. Now, Gelber says, we have a system in which the FCAT has “dumbed down” our curricula to levels of “minimum competency.” Meanwhile, Gelber charges, the legislature “shifted the hard cost of education to property owners,” in the form of higher local school levies.

It’s hard to imagine that Florida’s public education funding could be worse. Last session, in a sleight of hand rivaled only by David Copperfield, lawmakers conjured the appearance of increased funding in order to make Florida schools eligible for Pres. Obama’s federal stimulus bailout. They shifted money earmarked for instructional materials into the student expenses column, for instance, in order to make the per-pupil spending appear more generous. We got the stimulus money, which saves us for now. But that money won’t last forever – and the funding inadequacies remain.

Bad as things are, they might have been even worse, Gelber says, without the class-size amendment. Enacted by the voters in 2002, class-size reduction requirements were the only barrier to the complete collapse of public education funding. Had the voters not demanded that $16 billion  go to class size reduction, Gelber says, “They [lawmakers]could have given that money away, too, as tax breaks to corporations — to people no one’s ever heard of.”

And in the midst of the decade-long education slash-fest, Gelber points out, “We’ve added to our costs.” Lawmakers and the voters created the Bright Futures Scholarship program, as well as voluntary pre-K, without sufficient new funding sources for either program. These political mandates expand Florida’s duties far beyond its primary, constitutional one: to adequately fund a “high quality” K-12 system of education.

Former Lieutenant Governor and former FAU President Frank Brogan was recently exalted in the Tallahassee Democrat for speaking out on the need to shore up Florida’s public university system — a system he now leads as chancellor. Last month, he told the Capital Tiger Bay Club he wants to ensure that his 4-year-old son can transition seamlessly into an excellent Florida university when he grows up, in hopes that young Master Brogan will decide to stay in Florida as an adult. But where will the chancellor send his child for elementary, middle and high school? Will the younger Brogan, like Gelber’s three children or mine, attend public schools?

Just as Jeb Bush once pitted private schools against public schools; just as higher education advocates may begin a tug of war with those of us who say K-12 funding must come first; so, too, do other ugly and distracting debates consume us. In Jacksonville, for example, neighborhood school proponents cry foul over the district’s attempt, in fiscal hard times, to preserve some of its most successful schools, its magnet schools. Floridians shouldn’t be fooled by these distracting battles, though. They’re red herrings. As education gets tossed around again like a political football, keep your eyes on the referees.

It seems that the only way to direct the debate back to how to fund Florida’s public schools may be to take it off the political field altogether -- and take it into the courtroom. Gelber says he’ll do just that if he’s elected as Florida’s Attorney General. It’s a move that legal experts say is doable.

“Not only is it doable,” says Gelber, “it’s our obligation.”

Tags: Dan Gelber, Florida Public Schools, Jeb Bush, Public Schools, Roberto Martinez, State Politics, Tommy Hazouri

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 9:00 PM and is filed under Local Politics, State Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.