by on
The Truth Matters
Why, yes! Yes it does, Florida GOP!

Apparently the Florida GOP is tired of getting beaten up in the media by public education advocates who cried foul after the education budget increased the base student allocation by 47 cents. Pardon the bold, italicized wording at the end of the last sentence, it’s only to ensure that specific wording is employed to clarify any misconceptions. So, to combat this endless churn in the news cycle, the Florida GOP–you know, the ones who are always touting fiscal conservatism while budgets continue to balloon for everything except public education–have decided to waste more taxpayer dollars to produce this video that up to this point has been watched a whopping 472 times.

If you haven’t seen this gem, go ahead and waste five minutes of your life so you can see for yourself just how much the Florida GOP thinks of teachers.

On the heels of National Teacher Appreciation Week, the Florida GOP likens all of us a disheveled lout named Frank. Make no mistake about it, there is no way their opening analogy can be construed any other way. Apparently anyone who has the nerve to call out the Florida Legislature is, according to the GOP, perpetuating a “myth.”

For those who are unaware of the etymological roots of that word, it simply means “story” (and nothing more) in ancient Greek. We all tell stories, and this is the Florida GOP’s attempt to craft a narrative of convenience that clearly demonstrates their disdainful views about teachers, teachers’ unions, and our profession in general.

At the end of the video, when the narrator (myth-maker?) says that “the truth matters”, he talks about facts being stubborn things. So here are a few of which the general public should be aware:

1. 2007-2008 per-pupil spending was $7,126; next year’s will be $7,408. 11 years later, not even $300 higher. Can’t ignore inflation and the declining purchasing power of the almighty dollar…adjusted for inflation we should be at $8,311 just to have kept up.

2. But wait! It gets even better! As this chart indicates, Florida spent $6,443 per-pupil in 1998-99, which was 20 years ago for our Florida GOP who struggle with math and logic (trust me, I’m a 99th percentile Best and Brightest teacher!). This was just shy of the national average for per-pupil spending at the time (27th in the U.S.), and we now rank in the bottom 10% of all states in the U.S. (45th). What happened during that 20 year period?

Oh yeah, the Florida GOP took over our state government.

3. Despite all the bombastic claims of “historic”, “unprecedented”, “record-level” public education spending, we lag the national average by roughly $4,000, which is clearly seen in this chart (one can also see we still haven’t even fully recovered from the Great Recession, one of the many reasons we’ve had teacher walkouts/strikes erupting in GOP-led states). Also, as another stubborn/fun fact, if we kept up with inflation from our 1998-99 spending, we would need to spend $9,913.

National Average

The fact of the matter is that the Florida GOP’s little video isn’t fooling anyone, least of all public education advocates. But it’s clearly a message intended to be seen by “working Floridians”, you know, that 45% of Florida’s population that is considered “working poor” and has clearly prospered so much under the Rick Scott administration, especially in rural counties where they have been left even further behind than before he began his tenure.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, Florida GOP, but the only ones who are in the myth-making business is your party.

And, no, I’m not a Democrat or whatever else you’d like to call me in case you want to jump straight to ad hominem attacks.

P.S. – This is my favorite scene in the entire video. What the Florida GOP unwittingly included was a meeting of Academica, Charter Schools USA, and Charter School Associates, three of the largest for-profit charter management companies who all donate heavily to the Florida GOP to ensure they will continue to siphon off tens of millions of dollars from the kids and classrooms to pad their profit lines. Sorry/not sorry about that stubborn little fact too.

For-Profit Charters
This message sponsored by the Florida GOP and their For-Profit Charter Management Overlords

by on
BFOC 1
Monday, February 26th, 6 p.m. at Tampa Theatre

BACKPACK FULL OF CASH Official Trailer from Stone Lantern Films on Vimeo.

Are you a concerned public education advocate? Interested in seeing a FREE movie about the for-profit charter school industry and the slow, steady privatization of public education here in the United States? If you answered yes to either question, you cannot afford to miss Backpack Full of Cash at Tampa Theatre on Monday, February 26th.

Those who know me personally or have been following the Teacher Voice project since its inception realize that I have no love lost on the for-profit charter industry, which, to be completely honest, is defrauding taxpayers here in Florida and all over the U.S. But before I make any further statements, let me preface the rest with the following two premises:

  1. Philosophically speaking, I have nothing against school choice. It would be disingenuous and hypocritical of me to work at a magnet school in an International Baccalaureate program and rail against school choice as a blanket indictment of all charter schools. What I do have a specific issue with is the lack of funding to support school choice in a meaningful way, because at the current substandard rate of funding here in Florida, it is the traditional public schools who suffer the most while trying to serve the 85+% of parents and students who still choose their neighborhood schools.
  2. Perhaps more importantly–as a taxpayer and fiscal watchdog–I find it absolutely shameful that there is so much corporate welfare and outright fraud happening right in front of our eyes. Our own Florida Legislature–especially elected officials who take donations from companies such as Academica, Charter Schools USA, and Charter School Associates–are complicit in the fraud because they are bilking taxpayers for tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars per year, the result being the slow and steady decimation of our public education system in the Sunshine State.

Not all charters are equal. Some of them are undoubtedly started by well-meaning, caring individuals who want to provide a niche program for our students. They are genuinely run by true non-profit boards and nearly every scarce per-pupil dollar is spent on students and the classroom.

The schools run by the for-profit charter school industry, however, siphon off much of the money to their bottom lines in various, ethically dubious ways. Here are a few examples: the for-profit company will install their own handpicked boards that in turn hire the company for “management,” and these fees routinely cost up to 15% of the school’s FTE; the for-profit company will demand that parents purchase supplies directly from the school itself, which is often another LLC that charges exorbitant rates for the basics; in many cases, the biggest part of the scam is one LLC (e.g. Red Apple Development, the construction arm of Charter Schools USA) will purchase land to build the school on and then turn around and charge the school (read: taxpayers) rent that is substantially higher than the going rate/property value, sometimes as high as a million dollars a year. Between all these scams, the for-profit charter magnates routinely take around 25% of all FTE that should go to kids and classrooms.

If you are a teacher here in Hillsborough County, last year alone the charter schools received approximately $125 million in FTE. If even half of our charters are managed by these companies, and if 25% of the money they are skimming from the top for their own bottom lines is correct, then that means they profited to the tune of nearly $16 million. That money could have done a lot of good in our school system, including funding all employees’ scheduled salary increases.

This movie is trying to expose a fraudulent trend spreading across America. As citizens, we have a civic duty to be informed and to demand our elected officials to STOP wasting precious taxpayer dollars, fostering and facilitating a peripheral education system that has little to no accountability,  and to make a real investment in public education that serves the interests of our children and their future, not padding the profit lines of these for-profit charlatans.

More Information About the Show

BFOC 2