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Florida 3rd-Graders Get Their Share of Shock, Awe
The thing about a plan is that you ought to have one.

Jeb Bush would like to be known as the education governor. He wants to raise standards and eliminate social promotion. He wants to get rid of bad schools and let students go where they can get a quality education.

That's what he says and has been saying for a long time. Maybe it's true. It all sounds good. I don't know anyone who likes rampant social promotion or lower standards. Everyone I know is for some kind of accountability.

For years the governor has delivered his message in photo-op moments, showing up for an hour at some local school for the picture that will run the next morning in Mother Trib or some other paper.

The trouble is, for all his show- and-tell presentations, things aren't getting better.
At last check, Florida's education system was
continuing its steady slide, from ignoring the needs of universities on down to the chaos of student testing and the possibility of thousands of third-graders failing.

Bush was at it again this week, this time at Cahoon Elementary in Tampa. His message this time was that families should appreciate politicians who ``actually care their children are learning.''

That's a good one to anyone who has been following the machinations in Tallahassee, where politicians are demonstrating daily that about the only thing they care about is protecting their hides.

Can You Putt?

As program after program designed to help the hungry and the poor goes down the tubes, local special interest projects somehow manage to survive.

So far, the proposed Edison Community College golf building is still kicking, at $700,000, as is a softball training center in Altamonte Springs for $100,000.

Oh, and there also is the $10 million proposed for a light rail line from Orlando's airport to Disney World, which might be one more reason the proposed high-speed rail through Tampa won't bother stopping at Tampa International.

On Monday, Bush flew in to prop up what could be a public relations disaster in a few weeks when the results of this year's Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test roll in and potentially tens of thousands of third-graders who failed are told they will be held back.

The governor said that might be all right. Holding students back a year can be a good thing, he told reporters. He had little to say about special-needs students who might take the test until doomsday, but that's another issue.

But Who Pays?

In case some people don't think staying back for a year is a good thing, Bush said he wants summer camps set up with reading mentors. Education Secretary Jim Horne, who came along, said if kids do well in those programs, they might not be held back.

What nobody seemed to say was exactly who would pay for all of this or where all those mentors would be found.

Horne said local school districts would have to pay for the remediation. Unfortunately the state already asked the schools to spend that money on other programs, and the bottom line is there is little or no money left.

That isn't the governor's problem. He is long gone, talking about his latest plan elsewhere in Florida.

The problem is ours - just as it is our fault that the educational system is in the hands of budgeteers instead of educators and that the bottom line is not just money but where we are headed on the learning curve.



— Steve Otto
3rd-Graders Get Their Share Of Shock, Awe
Tampa Tribune
April 17, 2003
http://www.tampatrib.com/MGAQKGM3MED.html

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