Arza
If the chatter among Florida charter school supporters is any indication, expect to see proposed legislation next spring that calls for equitable funding for charter schools and the return of charter authorizers who are independent from public school districts.
“This is a forced marriage that needs counseling,’’ joked Ralph Arza, a former Florida legislator who now serves as the governmental affairs director for the Florida Consortium on Public Charter Schools.
More than 100 charter school operators and advocates, who met Wednesday during the 16th Annual Florida Charter School Conference in Orlando, also want more streamlined applications and sanctions against districts that drag out the appeals process.
The way it works now, some applications call for thousands of pages of documentation, said Collette Papa of Academica, a charter school management company with about 100 schools in Florida. If a district denies the application, the appeals process can take anywhere from three to six months, Papa said. If the charter school wins approval, often it’s too late to hire teachers, secure a site and recruit students in time to open the same year, she said.
Papa was part of a 7-member panel that included Mike Kooi from the Florida Department of Education’s Office of Independent Education and Parental Choice, Pamela Owens of Charter Schools of Boynton Beach, Marvin Pitts of Mavericks in Education in south Florida, Gene Waddell of Indian River Charter High School in Vero Beach and Tim Kitts, who operates five Bay Haven Charter Academy schools in Panama City.
The panel discussion anchored a town hall meeting that kicked off the two-day conference. It was sponsored by the consortium and led by Arza, who served in the Legislature between 2000 and 2006 and helped pass education laws including former Gov. Jeb Bush’s A++ plan.
Since that time, Arza said, the state has slowly chipped away at the heart of school choice reforms. (more…)
A Miami Herald story this week about the political contributions of teachers unions and for-profit education companies in Florida offers another opportunity to consider the term “privatization.”
The word has become a potent weapon in debates about the continuing customization of public education. But it’s being misused, and needs to be accurately defined so we can have a more meaningful dialogue about the best way forward.
Herald reporter Kathleen McGrory devoted most of her story to the political contributions of charter and virtual school interests. After noting the total contributions from those interests, she framed the piece this way: “Some observers say the big dollars foreshadow the next chapter of a fierce fight in Tallahassee: the privatization of public education.”
McGrory only briefly noted that those contributions pale in comparison to the donations from teachers unions, which are private corporations that sell memberships to teachers employed by school districts. According to the story, a variety of for-profit education interests, including those in the higher ed realm, collectively contributed $1.8 million in this election cycle. Meanwhile, national, state and local teachers unions kicked in $3.2 million.
The Herald story seemed to suggest that teachers unions are not private interests, which is false. And it listed this season’s top private contributor as Academica, the Miami-based charter school company, even though teachers unions contributed far more than the company did.
Privatization occurs when government allows private interests – in whatever form they take – to usurp the public good. Hopefully, the millions put into Florida political campaigns by teachers unions will not cause elected officials to put teacher concerns above those of the public good.
This privatization would be bad for everyone, including teachers.
