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Florida Education Commissioner's Mistakes Keep Piling Up
Ohanian Comment: Incompetence, ideological blindness, and unethical behavior. Now all Horne needs to do is add sex, drugs, and rock and roll and he can sell his memoirs.
The list of mistakes by Florida Education Commissioner Jim Horne keeps growing toward career-ending proportions. Incompetence and ideological blindness have dominated the list. The new entry is unethical behavior.
The Post reported last week that before Mr. Horne became commissioner in 2001, he allowed his accounting firm to take tens of thousands of dollars in fees to audit two charter schools' books while he was lobbying for the schools. The twin roles created a conflict of interest because the firm, as lobbyist, would have done better if the firm, as auditor, had found that the schools were financially sound. Eventually, the Duval County School Board shut down the schools for financial mismanagement. Mr. Horne, at the time a state senator, also touted his political connections when soliciting business and when lobbying school districts to give his firm's clients more money.
Further, Mr. Horne has a bad or convenient memory. He told The Post that he did not know how Empowering Young Minds Academy, one of the charter schools, had become a client. In fact, Mr. Horne wrote to the school's principal on his firm's letterhead, advising her that he had been central in writing charter legislation and saying, "I will call you in the next two weeks to discuss how we can help you." The principal later wrote that the school hired Mr. Horne's firm because it wanted "a company that was known to the state of Florida."
Aside from his ethics problem, Mr. Horne's biggest failure as a supposed advocate for Florida's public schools has been to meekly agree to Gov. Bush's starvation budgets. Not that Mr. Horne, with a $231,000 salary, has to starve. But what, exactly, does Mr. Horne do to earn his money?
An education advocate would have protested this year when Gov. Bush and the Legislature cut community colleges and universities by $40 million, and the governor claimed that "flexibility" would enable them to deal with an additional 22,000 students. Instead, Mr. Horne was happy to accept the cut.
An education advocate would have insisted that Florida comply with the class-size amendment's requirement that the state cover the costs. Instead, Mr. Horne acquiesced in the decision to steal money from other basics, probably in the hope that resulting pain will cause voters to rescind the amendment.
Then there are the non-budgetary failures. An education advocate would have made sure that state and federal academic standards were compatible. Instead, Mr. Horne has allowed the state to adopt confusing and conflicting rules. The result is that many schools earning good grades under the FCAT-based system are rated inferior under the No Child Left Behind law. The FCAT is a state law, and No Child is federal. That's no excuse, however, since the federal law lets states set their own standards for success. Because of the conflicting standards, school districts across the state could experience transportation nightmares when students demand to be transferred to other schools performing better under one arbitrary guideline or another.
An education advocate would have made sure that the state did not fail third-graders who flunked the FCAT without having a proven remedial plan in place. Instead, Mr. Horne allowed retention of a record number of third-graders, offering only a lame, last-minute assortment of poorly financed summer reading classes, which most students failed.
An education advocate would have insisted that if the state were going to give away vouchers, public schools and private schools should be judged by the same standards. Instead, Mr. Horne has been such an ideologue on vouchers that he overlooked the total lack of accountability -- both financial and academic -- in programs he was supposed to monitor.
Vouchers have caused Mr. Horne the most embarrassment. In the Legislature, he helped to create hastily enacted voucher programs. As commissioner, he has not performed even the limited oversight required. Repeatedly, he has tried to mislead the public about his failures, claiming in letters to have collected data about voucher recipients that he did not have.
The embarrassment, for Mr. Horne and Gov. Bush, has been extreme. An Islamic school founded by an accused terrorist got so-called corporate vouchers. So did a bankrupt businessman operating a correspondence school out of a strip mall. Although Mr. Horne recently has claimed in public that he has authority to cut off money to such schools, he has admitted privately that he might not.
One more deception: Mr. Horne and Gov. Bush claimed that they were requiring voucher recipients to fill out pages of new information to ensure accountability, but th forms they produced simply called for information the state already was supposed to collect. Even schools that got the money with good intentions have not had to prove that their students are learning on a par with public school students by submitting FCAT scores.
Under Mr. Horne, the Department of Education provided lax oversight of yet another voucher program: McKay Scholarships, for disabled students. "Brokers" have siphoned a share of the grants by charging recipients fees and have diverted money to home-schoolers, subverting the program's intent.
Mr. Horne got his job as education commissioner the same way his company got auditing business from charter schools: through exploitation of political contacts. In doing so, he has exploited himself into a position that clearly is over his head. Public schools and public school students are suffering under his "leadership."
— Editorial
Horne report card shows mostly failures
Palm Beach Post
2003-09-14
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/auto/epaper/editions/sunday/opinion_f326042c22d501c00012.html?urac=n&urvf=10635900349720.0087638673628370
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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