Florida’s education commissioner, Tony Bennett, has resigned his position effective immediately, the Florida Times-Union reports.
Only four days ago, it was widely reported, beginning with the Associated Press, that he had emailed employees at Indiana’s Department of Education to rig the school grading system so a favored charter school would receive an ‘A’ in order to appear as if it was successful when, in fact, it was not. He was the state superintendent in Indiana until he lost an election there and came to Florida.
Mr Bennett indicated at a news conference on Thursday that Florida’s former Governor Jeb Bush, for whom he serves as chair of the group Chiefs for Change, thought he should remain in his post as education commissioner, the Times-Union reported. The state’s current governor, Rick Scott, accepted Mr Bennett’s resignation but also tried to convince him to stay, according to a report in the Orlando Sentinel. The decision to resign was Mr Bennett’s alone, he said.
What a mess this is in Florida! Just a few weeks ago, the Florida Board of Education changed the state’s school grading system, which awards ‘A’–’F’ grades to each school based on criteria that are complex and difficult for the public to understand. To make matters worse, they found it odd that grades for some schools changed wildly from year to year. How could a system be reliable if schools were strong one year and weak the next? they wondered. So, in order to fix that public relations problem—and trust me, schools didn’t change that much from one year to the next—they came up with a hard-and-fast rule that no school could drop by more than one letter grade. So, even if the numbers show a school went from a ‘B’ to a ‘D,’ the school’s grade would be adjusted to a ‘C’ so that it wouldn’t change by more than a letter grade.
There’s no official word on a replacement, although the Sentinel has suggested that Orange County Public Schools Superintendent Barbara Jenkins might be on the short list. She wouldn’t comment about that yet, but she’s well-known in state education circles and is liked by the governor. Her possible role as a lieutenant governor on Mr Scott’s reelection ticket might take precedence, though. “I am very hopeful that the State Board will swiftly stabilize the Department of Education as Florida heads into a period of significant transitions for public education,” the paper quoted her as saying.
That stabilization might not be so easy. Once a replacement is found, the state will have had four education commissioners in the 31 months Mr Scott has served as governor of the state, the others being Eric J Smith (Oct 2007–June 2011), Gerard Robinson (June 2011–2012), and Mr Bennett (Jan–August, 2013). The door to the commissioner’s office looks like a revolving one, and the changing messages from the state’s board don’t exactly inspire my confidence in FDOE’s ability to stabilize the situation.
Editorial
Education reform seems to be falling apart, and it’s primarily those who initiated the corporate reforms calling for accountability who keep knocking it down. For example, Jeb Bush, who will no doubt consider a run for president in 2016, was one of the biggest supporters of the PARCC multi-state testing consortium, and now, Republican leaders in his own state are calling on the state’s education leaders to pull out of the consortium.
Democrats, who favor the Common Core and the testing consortia, are just watching the Republican infighting for the moment. Schools are still educating students, just as they always were, but it won’t be long before this starts to have an effect. For example, schools in Florida will take part in the PARCC field test next year. That means the state’s schools will have to get another test onto their calendars, which are already replete with standardized tests. The field test will only take a day for any student who participates, but the school still has to schedule a computer in the computer lab for the purpose, making that computer unavailable for other uses during that time.
The fact that the question of whether Florida will drop out of PARCC is still open means schools in the state can’t be sure what they’ll have to do when it comes time for the field test. Whoever replaces Mr Bennett in Florida will have to lay out a clear path to stabilization, however difficult that might be to achieve. The state has been plagued with uncertainty in the public schools, and too many kids are being lost.
