Reforms No Silver Bullet For Education

Reuters reporter Stephanie Simon reviewed Jeb Bush's education reform efforts in Florida and found no silver bullet among them. These reforms; charter schools, literacy requirements for 3rd graders, intense focus on reading, cyber classes, and vouchers, were instituted during his tenure as governor, and did initially show improvements in student scores and graduation rates. But, as they say, time will tell, and time has told the public that these gains were generally short lived.

"After the dramatic jump of the Bush years, Florida test scores edged up in 2009 and then dropped, with low-income students falling further behind. State data shows huge numbers of high school graduates still needing remedial help in math and reading."

It must not be forgotten that all of the things they tried in Florida came with a price tag. While property values were high and the state's economy was doing well, it was easy to push things like reading coaches and teacher bonuses for Advanced Placement scores through the legislature. For other states looking to adopt those measures now, the extreme cost is prohibitive.

"States adopting the policies now, in a time of austerity, tend to leave out the costly support systems. That has stirred protests from school superintendents, school board members, teachers unions and parents who see the policies as punitive, humiliating and too narrowly focused on a single test as a measure of success."

The long term value of their efforts is also falling into question as students who were held back in 3rd grade because they could not pass the reading proficiency requirement, who received a lot of extra attention to help them do so the following year, showed no advantage over other students by the time they got to high school. In addition, according to an annual report required by the state, those students who received vouchers and used them to go to private schools did no better at reading or math than their peers in public schools.

Even with all this intense focus on improving student performance in Florida, Missouri students still receive higher ACT scores than Florida students which is significant since our states fairly closely match in the percentage of students who take the test.

Bush's foundation For Excellence in Education is in high gear drafting legislation, editing bills line by line and sending in experts to testify in various states like Maine, New Mexico and Florida. Reuters points out that "Bush foundation donors include family philanthropies, such as those established by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Corporate donors include Connections Education, a division of global publishing giant Pearson; Amplify, the education division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp; and K12, a publicly traded company that runs online schools."

His critics say these corporate associations diminish any bragging rights he might have to tout Florida's improvements. Bush says that any individual failings in programs by these companies should be noted and those programs dropped. Goody. But we have decades of teaching experience in this country to tell us what works and what doesn't. We shouldn't have to wait for the free market to catch up on this learning curve, meanwhile wasting money and minds.

Anyone out there looking for or touting a silver bullet for the things that ail our public schools is going to be disappointed. The Bush Foundation has not found it, no matter what they say. The best that can be done is for control of education to be returned to the most local level possible so each school can work out its own formula for success.