flynn082

In the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce most recent education agenda they stated they wanted to, “Advocate for reform of the current Duval County School Board governance structure to ensure, Jacksonville has the foundation to build a world class educational system” This in short means they think the school board has done a poor job and they want the city to go from an elected school board to an appointed one, flowery language aside. I wonder if they would have felt the same way had more of their candidates won election to the board over the last few years? Think about that, they want to take away the citizens ability to pick their representatives. That is the lead but before I continue we have to agree on a set of facts. No matter how you feel DCPS is doing, we must agree that they spend their money locally. Their budget, around 1.7 billion dollars annually is almost entirely spent in the city. DCPS also pays their teachers, on average more than charter schools and private schools pay ...

Republicans’ are starting their 21 st  year of complete control of public education and if you haven’t noticed things are getting worse not better. Instead of investing in our public schools, they insist on diverting more and more money to for profit charter schools of which hundreds have failed and voucher schools that have barely any accountability, don’t have to have certified teachers, or teachers with degrees and can have junk curriculums. Then the cherry on top is Tallahassee keeps heaping one unfunded mandate after another upon our schools severely limiting what they can and cannot do and its requiring districts to share what money they do have with charters many of which are run by for profit charter schools. Help is not coming, not from Tallahassee anyways but that doesn’t mean we can’t help ourselves. Port St. Lucie is about to join over a dozen other districts state wide that have decided they can no longer tolerate the abdicating of their responsibilities out of Tallaha...

Gary Chartrand a grocer by trade parlayed huge donations to Rick Scott into a spot on the state board of education despite the fact he had zero education experience and in an op ed to the Times Union he wants you to believe he cares about your children but the truth is he doesn't. He says that being in a good public school depends on the zip code you live in and nothing can be farther from the truth.  There are great public schools in every zip code even though there may be a difference in performance on state wide tests. The reason is poverty, something he has spent his life ignoring. Quite simply put, children as a group that live in neighborhoods mired in poverty don't do as well as children who don't. Chartrand would have you believe it is the schools fault ignoring the fact that here in Florida we invest very little in education when compared to other states. Chartrand says, if there is a school that is doing as well as he thinks it should, then parents should be allow...

A few months back Lori Hershey who i both like and think is doing a fantastic job said she wanted to re-partner with JPEF.  I was gobsmacked. I had spent the last five years fighting against the corporate interests seeking to privatize our schools of which JPEF has been an up front partner. Among a litany of things their former president sad he wasn't for good public schools, he was for good schools whether they be charters, voucher schools or public schools. An interesting position I felt for the president of an organization with public in their name. Then its founders Gary Chartrand is a huge force in Florida's privatization movement and is on record sayings its a good thing that teachers lost their work protections and can now be easily fired.  Then there is all the time they have pushed charters and privatization too. Fast forward to today and they have a new president, a former director of Teach for America, in fact most of their staff is former Teacher for America corp m...

Shine was an epically bad school board member who flamed out spectacularly. Instead of slinking off to the shadows where he should remain, he has reared his ugly head in a new campaign to privatize our schools.     From WJCT, A new Florida advocacy group is pushing for more school choice, as well as term limits for school board members and charter school independence. The School Choice Movement, which launched in Tallahassee Wednesday, is led by three former school board members, including Jacksonville’s Scott Shine. In an interview Thursday with WJCT News, Shine said school choice leads to academic achievement.     “When parents and students own the decision about what school they go to, it has a very positive and engaging affect on how well the student will do,” he said. To promote that, the School Choice Movement will push for more scholarships and funding for transportation to allow more students to attend the school of their choice. Florida’s scholarship pr...

Former speaker Richard Corcoran spent a legislative career proving he was no friend of public education and enriching his family by ramming through legislation that would benefit his wife who runs charter schools.  So what does governor DeSantis do? Why, despite a complete lack of education experience makes him commissioner of education and gives him over a quarter of a million dollar salary. Well where we may not be able to do anything about this ridiculous pick, Senator Janet Cruz wants to make sure we have a voice going forward by putting the commissioner of education back on the ballot.     From Florida Politics, State Sen.  Janet Cruz  filed a bill Tuesday that would return the state Commissioner of Education job to the ballot. “Floridians deserve the right to vote for who is leading our education system,” the Tampa Democrat said. “Voters currently have no direct influence on state education policy and this resolution seeks to put an end to that.” Cruz...

I work at an ESE center school and for time immemorial teachers were able to do so with their ESE K-12 certification. Well that has come to an end as now they are being required to take multiple subject area tests. Many of these teachers are veterans with decades of experience.   Speaking of these subject area tests, they now cost hundreds of dollars, have been made more difficult and failure rates have sky rocketed.     This has happened while according to the Florida Education Association, Florida currently has 2,200 teaching vacancies, 700 more than this time last year. One of the reasons is pay as Florida teachers are some of the lowest paid in the nation, but others include a lack of job security, teachers hired after 2010 can be let go at the end of a school year for any or no reason. The erosion of creativity and flexibility as many teachers are forced to teach to a high stakes test. A lack of resources, teachers routinely spend hundreds if not thous...

Vitti had a thing for former principal Alvin Brennan despite a long history of bullying his staffs. Vitti put him in charge of First Coast high an A school on the rise and Brennan mostly through massive staff defections dropped its performance in no time. There are at least three administrators that I know of working in the ivory tower that if a teacher would have performed as bad or as unethical as they did when they were principals they would have been out of a job but instead they were promoted down town. While they were principals they held the fate of many teachers in their hands, some had their carers cut short. This is why the following is so troubling. From the Sarasota Herald,   Members claim they were not informed about a state investigation into superintendent Cynthia Saunders When Cynthia Saunders became Manatee County Schools superintendent last June, the board that elected her was unaware she was under a state investigation for fraud. Her superior — and longtime frien...

I didn't vote for DeSantis. I don't agree with many of his education ideas. I think the privatization movement which he calls choice has been a failure and is harming our children and state and I believe the evidence backs me up. Though I have to say just a few weeks in I haven't been hating DeSantis either like I did Scott from day one.  He has called for change to the rules of medical marijuana and the environment which I would call baby steps in the right direction and he pulled back the nomination of Andre Pollack to the state board of education a position he was wholly unqualified for. What happend to Pollack's family is a tragedy, but a tragedy is not a qualification. This man who admits he never voted until he did so for Trump who seems to have completely embraced has also pushed right wing conspiracy theories, quit the safety commission he was nominated too and drips venom and vigor, telling his opponents he is going to get them, to make them pay. It's no do...

I am a big fan of Barrack Obama but that didn't stop me from looking hard at other candidates when he ran for reelection in 2012 and that's because his education policies were dreadful. Race to the top, brought blame the teacher evaluations and doubled down on high stakes testing and in my state of Florida led to the end of teacher protections for every teacher hired after 2010. Now they are all on one year contracts and can be let go for any and no reason.  I am a big fan of Barrack Obama but he didn't understand education. This seems to be a problem for at least some of the next group of democrats running for president. Kirsten Gillibrand said she wants to fix public schools, um spoiler alert they aren't broken and parrots the talking points of the right wing privatizers.  Then there is Corey Booker who has long favored charter schools to traditional public schools.  From the Gadfly on the Wall blog,  In California, 30,000  Los Angeles teachers are on strike b...

I listened to Kirsten Gillibrand's announcement that she was going to run for president on the Colbert show and I have to say i was a little insulted by her education comment.  One of the reason's she gave for running for president was she believes we should have better public schools for our kids because it shouldn't mater what block you grow up on. Better public schools. It shouldn't matter what block you grow up on. Sigh Is she running as a democrat or a republican because there she parroted one of the major attack lines that the right has spouted over the last few years against public schools and why they say the privatization of our schools is so important. What makes a public school bad? Is it a staff that doesn't care and doesn't do its job, or is it because a school is overwhelmed with needs and doesn't have the resources it needs to be successful. I would say it was the latter 999 times out of a thousand.  You see even in our lowest performing schoo...

Duval County Public Schools have some of the oldest schools in the state and are in need of over a billion dollars in repairs and upgrades.  The news reported that it would be cheaper to bulldoze dozens of buildings and replace them rather than repair them.    Duval’s teachers are also some of the lowest paid in not just the state but in the nation and of the six big Florida districts we are dead last. This has led to a teacher shortage that is only going to get worse. Then the state government keeps sending mandate after mandate to the district including providing extra security but routinely fails to fund them. Last year it funded only an extra forty-seven cents in discretionary spending, but when the costs of the mandates was factored in, Duval actually had less money to spend on its priorities than it had in years past. So what does Tallahassee do? It now requires the district to share its revenue with dozens of for profit charter schools, many of which are ...

Kimberly Daniels represents parts of the north and west side of Jacksonville in the Florida house of representatives. She claims to be a democrat but the truth is she has more in common with republicans than the party she says she represent. Last year when most democrats were getting failing ratings from Jeb Bush's public school privatization organization, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, they crowned her a champion, their highest rating. She also took in thousands of dollars from republican donors in her most recent reelection campaign.  Being a wolf in sheep's clothing is one thing, but her constantly running afoul of ethics is another. She just reached a settlement agreement with the Florida Commission of Ethics where she admits knowingly falsifying her financial statements.     She agreed to admit to her guilt as long as the  current  speaker of the house  Jose Oliva could determine her punishment, if any. I wouldn't hold my breath ...

I s the proposal to arm teachers about keeping kids safe or about protecting the NRA Andrew Pollack, appointed to the state board of education, apparently only because he wants to arm teachers, had this troubling tweet today. Really CNN is biased but NRATV isn’t. Oy vey, and Rick Scott somehow thinks this guy is qualified to be on the state board of education? Then two members of the Parkland commission appeared on NRATV From Florida Politics: Florida gun advocates expressed anger over the weekend at members of the Parkland commission who promoted pro-gun policy positions on NRATV, a publicity arm of the National Rifle Association. “NRA is nothing more than a gun lobby group and NRATV is the propaganda arm of that gun lobby group,” said Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime died in the Parkland shooting. “Anyone who says that they support school safety is WRONG and they know it. They support chaos in schools and gun sales. Sad when some in policy positions buy into that agenda.” The Ma...

Sheriff Bob Gualtieri was  on the radio program First Coast Connect today to discuss the recently complete Parkland safety   report and he said arming teachers was about saving money as much as anything else. During his interview with Melissa  Ross, he bemoaned that there were 1500 current police officer openings throughout the state and said we would need an additional 2,000 on top of that number to put a police officer in every school and that would cost 400 million dollars a year. Um so what? We put over a billion into vouchers every year. Charter schools take out about another two. How much do we spend on testing or blame the teacher’s evaluations? We couldn’t find that money if we looked? I mean isn’t protecting our children worth finding the money? Let me ask you a couple questions, what problem have you chosen to fix on the cheap and did that work? Would you ask a fireman to do surgery, because isn’t that like asking teachers to be cops too? If your child needed me...

Andrew Pollack is both unqualified for the state board of education and a conspiracy theorist. First, let me say that what happened to him and his family is a nightmare and he has my upmost sympathy. However, just because his daughter was killed does not make Pollack qualified to serve on the state board of education, which Rick Scott, in some sort of twisted publicity stunt, did on his way out the door. Not only are some of his ideas to arm teachers dangerous and myopic, they turn schools into little more than jails. Andrew Pollack has also indulged in far right conspiracy theories. From the Washington Post: A father of a Parkland school shooting victim appeared on “Fox & Friends” over the weekend and suggested, without evidence, that Democrats registered the accused shooter to vote from jail as part of an effort to steal Florida’s election. “It just shows you how despicable these Democrats are that they’ll stoop that low to go into the prison, the jail, and register these crimina...

Andrew Pollack is one of the parents of the slain Parkland students. I know two things, I can never understand the depth of this man's pain, what happened is an absolute tragedy and I weep for him, his family, his daughter, and all the other people effected, I know that and that this man has no business being on the state board of education, which Rick Scott on his way out the door appointed him to. Educators in Florida aren't even invited to the table to discuss let alone craft education policy. On the way out the door, Scott reappointed a businessman, and Pollacks slot would see him replace a rich grocer and Scott financial backer. Do you ever think, maybe if we would have educators in charge of education in Florida over the last few decades maybe things like the massacre wouldn't have happened? Florida has been so caught up in bashing public schools, and teachers and privatizing the system, all on the cheap, that quite frankly I believe it's blind luck we haven't...

When governor elect DeSantis, made Richard Corcorran the commissioner of education, he put the fox in charge of the hen house. The rest of the foxes he put on his education advisory commission. DeSantis didn't enlist mental health, and criminal justice experts, or educators, to help plan the future of education. Instead he turned to charter school, and voucher interests. You know those people not interested in improving education but instead who want to expand their piece of the pie. Did they discuss poverty, over testing, the teacher shortage, a lack of resources, crumbling schools, mental health or any of the important and relative issues related to education? No. They talked about expanding choice, that was the message they delivered to the public and we can no longer let the word choice go unchallenged, because this isn't about expanding choice, this is about the dismantling and privatization of public education and we need to make sure people know and understand that. Char...