Jeb Attacks!

[donsu]

http://www.buzzflash.com/mailbag/06/03/mai06073.html

(SEE HOW THEY DO IT)


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Subject: Jeb Attacks!

This coming November Florida will elect a new governor. With time running out on term limited Governor Jeb Bush the pace of his efforts to undermine public education is quickening.

Last year, as the Florida Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the school voucher case, Bush-backer, Tampa millionaire John Kirtley bused hundreds of school skipping children and their parents to Tallahassee to rally for the governor's program. Many of the same parents and their children were recalled to the Capitol this past February 15, 2006 to hear Gov. Bush announce that he will lead a drive to resurrect his three-times unconstitutional school voucher program by way of amending the Florida Constitution. With a sense of neither irony nor shame Jeb Bush told his predominantly African-American audience, "In Florida and the United States today, if you've got money you can make a choice. What about the children whose parents don't have the ability based on income to make that choice? Don't they have the same dreams? God gives every child the ability to learn. God does that!"

In 2002 Florida voters were asked to consider the re-election of Jeb Bush and the class-size amendment to the state Constitution on the same ballot. Both Bush and the class-size amendment won. Jeb Bush has since graciously accepted the will of the voters that he serve a second term as governor but never stopped scheming to reverse the class-size mandate. During the 2005 session of the Florida Legislature a devious Bush plan to gut the class-size amendment pit rural school districts against urban school districts. The plan never got out of the Senate.

Republican Sen. Alex Villalobos from Miami was among those who dared to stand up to the governor for his district's public school kids and their rights to a quality education. Jeb Bush's retribution against Sen. Villalobos has been swift and vindictive. Sen. Villalobos had been a champion of spinal cord research at the University of Miami and assistance to Miami Children's Hospital. Funding for both of those projects was among $27 million in cuts directed at South Florida counties in Bush's state budget for this year.

Apparently unsatisfied that the budget vetoes had chastened Villalobos, Bush engineered his political humiliation. Back in 2004, Senate Republicans had put Villalobos in line to assume the powerful post of President of the Senate in 2008. He would have been the first Cuban-American to hold that position. On Thursday Feb. 9th several of Bush's Senate allies announced they would no longer honor their pledges of support and that Sen. Jeff Atwater would become the next Senate President instead of Villalobos. With his team in place, Gov. Bush plans another run around the class-size amendment. This time the devious smokescreen will be a right-wing canard they call "the 65% solution."

The Florida Department of Education is a tool Jeb Bush is using to attack the public schools on another flank. It has now breathlessly declared that school districts have six months to generate functioning merit pay systems for teachers tied to standardized test scores and subject area tests that have not yet been created. DOE Chairman, John Wynn has threatened Miami-Dade County with a $35 million loss of state lottery funding for failure to comply.

Many of my fellow teachers are wondering out loud who loosed this insanity on our schools. But Jeb Bush is crazy like a fox. If with this departing salvo he can become the first to mortally wound the public schools in a state of the United States, he will be a hero in some quarters. There are powerful political and economic interests that dream of getting their hands on public education funding and privatizing the system. They are forces that will have much to say about who is to succeed his brother as President. It's just a shame that so many of Florida's children must be sacrificed at the altar of one man's political ambitions.

Paul A. Moore
United Teachers of Dade (AFT-NEA-FEA)
Miami, FL

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[shoelace414]

1. There was an atricle about Wisconsin's School Choice Program

it costs ~$1,500 per student for Public School and ~$2,500 for school choice.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

2. do. not. get. me. started.