Matt Reed: Who really runs Florida education?

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• New scrutiny of “return on investment.” ALEC wants a better trained workforce, but its members do not want to spend more on public education. To arm Republicans against calls to do that, conservative think tanks have produced studies showing Florida teachers’ total compensation (including benefits) looks good when divided by the number of hours they are contracted to be on campus.

“The smoke is only starting to clear from the legislative sessions of 2011, but this much is clear: Reformers scored unprecedented victories in the area of tenure reform, merit pay, public school transparency, charter schools, and school vouchers,” ALEC’s education report says.

The report card gives Florida a B+ for implementing high-stakes testing, grading schools and allowing school choice. Florida ranks second in the nation on its scale for education policy.

“This large Southern state with a majority-minority student population spends below the national average per student while leading the nation in academic gains,” ALEC says.

Notably, ALEC gives no credit to the classroom teachers, counselors and principals who actually achieved those gains.

Teachers the enemy?

Instead, ALEC’s report gives all of the credit to its reformers and to high-stakes testing and charter schools. Its opening paragraphs compare Republican legislators to the English who endured the bombing of London in World War II. It compares teachers and their unions to Hitler’s forces, who “overreached” in their assault and now must suffer the consequences.

“Organized in every state legislative district in the country, they put both paid and volunteer ‘boots on the ground’ during election season,” the report says. “The unions hire legions of lobbyists around the nation, enlist academics to defend their positions, and have very clear goals.”

The portrayal is offensive and factually inaccurate for Florida.

For example, one of ALEC’s favorite reforms in Florida are charter schools, designed to be free of unions and regulation. Yet, local and state data show charter schools have consistently underperformed regular old public schools. Mathematically, Brevard County could improve its achievement numbers just by closing all charter schools and sending the kids to traditional campuses.

Meanwhile, teachers have little power in a right-to-work state where they cannot strike and there are fewer Democrats than legislative committees in the Florida Senate.

I have no problem with Florida politicians meeting with business leaders or peers from other states to share ideas on “best practices.”

But on education, our politicians’ relationship with the American Legislative Exchange Council has resulted in unaccountable, top-down governance crafted by corporate sponsors. The result is education laws rooted in conservative ideology and comic-book portrayals of bad teachers, not reality in our public schools.

ALEC should open its doors to competing ideas.