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Darren Walker, who heads the education arm of the Rockefeller Foundation, says there are no simple solutions and "a number of strategies are required to get traction."...

"We learned the hard way that if you seek to change the public schools, you must be prepared to deal with repeated setbacks," he said.

Some people talk about FL education as if it was #1 in every category during the 8-year rein of FL's former Dem governor, Chiles, and then suddenly, everything fell apart with Gov Bush. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Gov. Bush has tried and succeeded in improving education for this state. This state has now been ranked #2 nationwide in the number of Nationally Certified Teachers, #4 in the nation in Educational Choice (up from #34), and FL community colleges are ranked #12 in the nation in terms of the number of students staying in school to graduation. Under Gov. Bush, 100% of FL students take the PSAT for free in public schools, something the People For the American Way have demanded in every state but not received.

And while other states are still struggling with antiquated formulas denying equitable educational funding to the poorest districts, FL has had an equitable forumula in place. Gov. Bush's push for literacy, setting grade level standards and testing, expanding testing to include science and expanding AP courses, all speak well of the education improvements made during his administration.

Will we be #1 overnight after at least 8 years of being at the bottom? Probably not.

But Gov Bush has not given up on public schools. He has improved them, created competition, and offered parents and low income students, disabled students and students in failed schools a variety of educational options they never had before. His record on education can stand up to whatever criticism is thrown at it.

Furthermore, those who have spent billions on education in this country know there is no "quick" fix. Yet, Gov. Bush's current opponent promises to fix education "the fastest." This is an empty promise. There is no one single solution. Gov. Bush's multi-pronged approach, and his dedication to this issue, is one of the best and most defendable elements of his overall record as governor.

But, summer, isn't McBride running on an Education platform? (^:

The Florida papers are choosing to tell the truth about Jeb's education record, wow! Did you do this?

This McBride guy, the lawyer who beat Janet Reno, should know better. He's an ex-Marine, for heaven's sakes. He's running on a platform promising to improve the state's schools – an interesting claim given that he is the hand-picked, lavishly financed candidate of the Florida teachers unions and the National Education Association (NEA), the very people who have wrecked Florida's schools.

Expecting a man as thoroughly beholden to the educrats as Bill McBride to undo the mess the NEA has created in America's schools would be like expecting a Mafia don to solve the problem of organized crime.
Back to the Slime Pit

summer, do you have Wait4Truth and redlipstick on your ping list? You, floriduh voter, PhiKapMom and JulieRNR21 all have great Fla. ping lists. Perhaps we should designate a chief Fla. pinger, and the rest of us can ping the pinger and avoid multiple ping lists? What do you say? (^:

an experiment to break up 2,000-student low-income public high schools into 500-student schools that are more personal.

That can't be thrilling the teachers' union folks. Our educrats lust to merge our small school district (K-8 only, with school-board funding of "public school choice" for high school) into an adjoining district.
But "bad things start to happen when you get more than 500 to 1000 people in one place." Namely, not everyone knows everyone else--so accountability suffers.

a variety of educational options

I was tuned to C-Span last night, and the candidates for Governor of PA were debating education. I fear that the Democrat sounded as good as the Republican on this issue-- faint praise indeed, in this case. The Libertarian candidate was head and shoulders above on education; everyone else was determinedly fixated inside the box of

government school uber alles.
To listen was to cringe. And even the Libertarian put some emphasis on "public school choice." Trouble with that is, of course, that it threatens some white suburbanites and thus is unnecessarily divisive. I am for the practical option--private school choice. That takes race/class out of the equation, freeing us to unite as adults against the domineering of educrats.