What the "free market" looks like for Florida's K12 Education

Let's talk about "free market" & PreK12 Education

Dear friends, parents, grandparents, educators and all taxpaying Floridians (which includes sales tax, so that’s everybody, including our visitors),

Conversation about the future of education in Florida has become increasingly important as several powerful Floridians have recently made plain their support of publicly funded, unregulated, for-profit, unaccountable K12 education - all under the glittering lure of the title “free market.”

I decided to weigh in this past weekend via an opinion piece in the Tampa Bay Times, which is linked at the end of this newsletter.

By very definition, free market competition creates winners and losers. That yields competitive pricing and even product quality when it comes to consumer items like clothing, cars or pizza. It also yields the often slow shuttering of failing enterprises that do not meet the mark. That may work for adults who are taking known business risks, but how can we possibly accept an increased failure rate and lack of meaningful standards and accountability for the education of Florida’s children?

Recent comments from school choice advocate Erika Donalds, whose husband Byron Donalds is the GOP candidate for Florida governor, identified “great teachers” as “probably the biggest barrier” to implementing new technology in classrooms. As founder and chairman of OptimaEd, a company offering AI and virtual reality-based education products, she also has a personal financial interest in the education technology market.

AI will undoubtedly be part of our students’ futures, and schools have a responsibility to prepare them to use it effectively, responsibly and thoughtfully at the right grade levels and with parental consent. But emerging research gives us good reason to be cautious about assuming that more technology automatically means better learning.

MIT’s recent report on AI and education warns that overreliance on AI can interfere with the cognitive effort necessary for learning, particularly when students use it to bypass the difficult work of thinking, writing and problem solving.

That concern extends beyond AI. In The Digital Delusion, neuroscientist and educator Jared Cooney Horvath examines years of research on classroom technology and argues that digital tools can displace the human interaction, attention and mental effort that learning requires. His case is not that technology has no place in education, but that putting technology at the center of the classroom can come at a real educational cost.

This makes teachers and their judgment more important, not less. The question shouldn’t be how quickly we can get teachers out of technology’s way. It should be how we equip excellent teachers with the knowledge, training and evidence to determine when technology enhances learning and when it gets in the way. They are, after all, the ones on the front lines, witnessing firsthand how AI and technology affect students, their learning and their development.

Our teachers aren’t a barrier to the future of education. They are essential to getting that future right.

The Florida legislature has been funding public education sub-inflation for nearly 20 years to the detriment of your families and neighbors. Then, in 2023, the legislature expanded “school choice” beyond any recognition of its 2000/2001 origin. Having more than quintupled (that’s > 5x) to $5.6 billion the amount of public funds in private hands in a mere three years, we have to ask ourselves and our legislators two important questions:

Are kids learning? Are our tax dollars being wisely invested and publicly reported?

And don’t kid yourself or allow yourself to be kidded: all consumer products and services are regulated in this free-market capitalism of ours. Including pizza. For example, when I was on the project team to design and build the Southwest Airlines terminal at Tampa International Airport, a government project that gives public dollars to a private company to deliver a public good, you can bet that our private company was required to be licensed; hire licensed architects, engineers and contractors; have plans signed, sealed and permitted; provide detailed specifications that all materials met or exceeded transportation and building codes; and provide a public accounting of every penny that was spent.

Similarly, Florida’s public schools operate under extensive academic and financial accountability requirements. Their teachers must meet certification standards and schools must be accredited. Student achievement is measured through the state test, learning gains, graduation rates and more, then publicly reported. This past school year, 76% of Florida’s 3,450 schools were A or B schools. There were just six F schools in the entire state. Families deserve this meaningful information when making decisions about their children’s education, and taxpayers deserve to know whether their K12 education dollars are producing results. Including the $5.6 billion in voucher funding.

At Educating Florida’s Future, Academic and Financial Accountability is one of our four guiding priorities. We believe that all Florida students receiving taxpayer-funded PreK-12 education, whether in public or nonpublic schools, should take the Florida assessment and report results to ensure they are learning and making academic progress.

And that wherever education tax dollars are spent, those dollars should be subject to appropriate financial controls, audits and public reporting.

While it has become popular to use business phrases like “move fast and break things”, we must make conservative, responsible decisions about where to apply that tactic. Just last week while celebrating 25 years of vouchers in Florida, State Senator Burgess, Chairman of the PreK-12 Appropriations Subcommittee, expressed pride in the way Florida has been “building the plane while flying it” regarding the massive voucher expansion.

Building the plane while flying it? For children? In this test pilot phase, some of Florida’s youngest minds are losing learning during the most vital time of their cognitive development.

Florida has taken its eye off the ball.

It is time for Florida to believe in, invest in and lead public PreK-12 education with an uncompromising commitment to excellence, just as we do our nation’s military.

I hope you will take a few minutes to read the full column and consider the questions it raises for our state and our children.

Click here to read Laura's column:

Is unregulated capitalism the best way to educate Florida kids?

Thank you for being engaged in the conversation about the future of education in Florida.

Kind regards,

Laura Hine

CEO Founder

While Laura is a member of the Pinellas County School Board, these views and those expressed through Educating Florida's Future are her own and do not represent Pinellas County Schools or the Pinellas County School Board.

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