This is what the politicians we elect do for us when our back is turned.

This is what the Supreme Court decides when our backs are turned.

It’s time to turn around. It’s time to FORCE these people to look us in the eye and explain themselves, and it’s time for YOU and ME to take back our government. It’s time for YOU and ME to say enough and let the politicians know that they are FIRED if they don’t start listening.

What’s next Virtual Education? Maybe. These people don’t want school choice. The TEACHER UNIONS don’t want school choice. We do. These are OUR children, not theirs. [Side note: Ask some of the politicians where they send their kids.} Do we count anymore?

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: “JEB BUSH’S REFORMS IMPROVED PUBLIC SCHOOLS”

]]> http://flvirtualfamilies.edublogs.org/2008/04/18/in-case-you-missed-it/feed/ 2 http://flvirtualfamilies.edublogs.org/2008/04/16/elected-or-appointed/ http://flvirtualfamilies.edublogs.org/2008/04/16/elected-or-appointed/#comments Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:29:03 +0000 flvirtualfamilies http://flvirtualfamilies.edublogs.org/2008/04/16/elected-or-appointed/ Thanks to the Foundation for Florida’s Future for this article, and take it to heart. 

A decade ago, Florida schools were failing and ranked near the bottom in nearly every national survey. More than half of the state’s public school students were not reading or performing math at grade level. Mediocrity was tolerated and excuses were more common than accountability.
In November of 1998, Floridians voted to turn around the state’s failing school system, electing Jeb Bush as Governor and making the Commissioner of Education an appointed professional rather than an elected position. The state’s top education official would soon begin reporting directly to the Governor and the State Board of Education. The following year, Florida ’s A+ Plan for Education was put into action – a plan based on high standards and expectations, clear measurement and accountability, and rewards and consequences for results.
Florida has experienced unprecedented rising student achievement in public schools since the introduction of accountability in 1999. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, our fourth graders are now above the national average in reading and math. Eighth graders are ninth in the nation in writing. Overall, the state is steadily closing the achievement gap. Florida ’s high school graduation rate has increased by more than 12 percent since 1999 and more students are entering college.
Now, the Florida Legislature is about to turn back the clock to the days when popularity at the ballot box determined the quality of education in the classroom. As part of comprehensive overhaul of our system of education, the Florida Legislature is considering a proposal to once again create an elected Commissioner of Education. This proposed measure would jeopardize the tremendous progress in our schools by returning education to the political arena. The state’s top education official would no longer be a professional educator answering to the Governor, but a politician armed with his or her own campaign platform. The brightest and most-qualified professionals in the field of education would be deterred from entering expensive and partisan statewide campaigns.
Returning to this faulty organizational structure will also decrease the accountability of education in Florida . Currently, the people of Florida hold the Governor and the Legislature accountable for policies and, more importantly, the results. This change will create competing political interests in one of the state’s biggest priorities.
Moreover, this resolution disbands the State Board of Education – a board comprised of members from various backgrounds in public education, community colleges and business. Instead, the Florida Cabinet comprised of the Governor, Attorney General, Agriculture Commission, Chief Financial Officer, and the elected Commissioner would become responsible for making decisions on education policy issues – again, another opportunity for political gamesmanship.
Florida ’s current system of governance with a Governor, State Board of Education and an appointed education commissioner is a formula for success used in high-achieving states around the country. In Education Week’s Quality Counts 2008, 7 of the top 10 states overall have appointed Commissioners of Education working with appointed State Boards of Education. All of the top 10 states for K-12 achievement in the report have appointed Commissioners of Education. Finally, based on the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the “Nation’s Report Card,” nearly all of the states with the greatest improvement in eighth grade reading, eight grade math scores and graduation rates have appointed education commissioners.
To continue the progress and student learning gains in our schools, we strongly encourage you to contact your Representatives in opposition of House Joint Resolution 7025. The Senate has already approved its companion resolution and the House of Representatives is poised to do the same unless enough Floridians make their voices heard. Whether it is calling your legislator, writing a letter to your local newspaper opposing this amendment or talking to your friends and neighbors about this issue, it is critical to act now.

These two schools offer hundreds of Florida children quality choices in public education. Students have access to great curriculum, great teachers, opportunities for socialization and enrichment, and much more. The schools are accountable to the state’s taxpayers, and, most important, are accountable to parents like me who believe full time public virtual schools are indeed the best fit for children who just were not succeeding in a traditional setting. In fact, last year, both K-8 virtual schools received “A” grades from the State of Florida, and did so with less funding per student than traditional public schools.

Florida lawmakers are considering policies that will affect the future public virtual schools and the children who attend them. The legislature should do so with the following simple principle in mind: treat our children the same as those children enrolled in traditional public schools.

Choice is important to parents like me, and Florida has become a national leader in this area. Parents must be able to choose the public school that is best suited for their individual child, including full time, public virtual schools. The legislature should permit any student the option of enrolling in a public virtual school regardless of where they went to school last year or if they are a new student ready to start kindergarten this year.

Virtual education has come to mean so much to so many families in Florida, and the Legislature should make sure that this incredible program is available to even more deserving families.

California Home-Schooling Ruling Called ‘Assault on Family’
By Randy Hall
CNSNews.com Staff Writer/Editor
March 10, 2008

“I have sincerely held religious beliefs,” he told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday. “Public schools conflict with that. I have to go with what my conscience requires me to do.”

MILWAUKEE — Weekday mornings, three of Tracie Weldie’s children eat breakfast, make beds and trudge off to public school — in their case, downstairs to their basement in a suburb here, where their mother leads them through math and other lessons outlined by an Internet-based charter school.

Half a million American children take classes online, with a significant group, like the Weldies, getting all their schooling from virtual public schools. The rapid growth of these schools has provoked debates in courtrooms and legislatures over money, as the schools compete with local districts for millions in public dollars, and over issues like whether online learning is appropriate for young children.

One of the sharpest debates has concerned the Weldies’ school in Wisconsin, where last week the backers of online education persuaded state lawmakers to keep it and 11 other virtual schools open despite a court ruling against them and the opposition of the teachers union. John Watson, a consultant in Colorado who does an annual survey of education that is based on the Internet, said events in Wisconsin followed the pattern in other states where online schools have proliferated fast.

“Somebody says, ‘What’s going on, does this make sense?’ ” Mr. Watson said. “And after some inquiry most states have said, ‘Yes, we like online learning, but these are such new ways of teaching children that we’ll need to change some regulations and get some more oversight.’ ”

Two models of online schooling predominate. In Florida, Illinois and half a dozen other states, growth has been driven by a state-led, state-financed virtual school that does not give a diploma but offers courses that supplement regular work at a traditional school. Generally, these schools enroll only middle and high school students.

At the Florida Virtual School, the largest Internet public school in the country, more than 50,000 students are taking courses this year. School authorities in Traverse City, Mich., hope to use online courses provided by the Michigan Virtual School next fall to educate several hundred students in their homes, alleviating a classroom shortage.

The other model is a full-time online charter school like the Wisconsin Virtual Academy. About 90,000 children get their education from one of 185 such schools nationwide. They are publicly financed, mostly elementary and middle schools.

Many parents attracted to online charters have previously home-schooled their children, including Mrs. Weldie. Her children — Isabel, Harry and Eleanor, all in elementary school — download assignments and communicate intermittently with their certified teachers over the Internet, but they also read story books, write in workbooks and do arithmetic at a table in their basement. Legally, they are considered public school students, not home-schoolers, because their online schools are taxpayer-financed and subject to federal testing requirements.

Despite enthusiastic support from parents, the schools have met with opposition from some educators, who say elementary students may be too young for Internet learning, and from teachers, unions and school boards, partly because they divert state payments from the online student’s home district.

Other opposition has arisen because many online charters contract with for-profit companies to provide their courses. The Wisconsin academy, for example, is run by the tiny Northern Ozaukee School District, north of Milwaukee, in close partnership with K12 Inc., which works with similar schools in 17 states.

The district receives annual state payments of $6,050 for each of its 800 students, which it uses to pay teachers and buy its online curriculum from K12.

Saying he suspected “corporate profiteering” in online schooling, State Senator John Lehman, a Democrat who is chairman of the education committee, last month proposed cutting the payments to virtual schools to $3,000 per student. But during legislative negotiations that proposal was dropped.

Jeff Kwitowski, a K12 spokesman, said, “We are a vendor and no different from thousands of other companies that provide products and services to districts and schools.”

Pennsylvania has also debated the financing of virtual charter schools. Saying such schools were draining them financially, districts filed suit in 2001, portraying online schools as little more than home schooling at taxpayer expense. The districts lost, but the debate has continued.

Last year, the state auditor found that several online charters had received reimbursements from students’ home districts that surpassed actual education costs by more than $1 million. Now legislators are considering a bill that would in part standardize the payments at about $5,900 per child, said Michael Race, a spokesman for the State Department of Education.

The state auditor in Kansas last year raised a different concern, finding that the superintendent of a tiny prairie district running an online school had in recent years given 130 students, and with them $106,000 in per-pupil payments, to neighboring districts that used the students’ names to pad enrollment counts. The auditor concluded that the superintendent had carried out the subterfuge to compensate the other districts for not opening their own online schools.

“Virtual education is a growing alternative to traditional schooling,” Barbara J. Hinton, the Kansas auditor, said in a report. Ms. Hinton found that virtual education had great potential because students did not have to be physically present in a classroom. “Students can go to school at any time and in any place,” she said.

But, she added, “this also creates certain risks to both the quality of the student’s education and to the integrity of the public school system.”

Rural Americans have been attracted to online schooling because it allows students even on remote ranches to enroll in arcane courses like Chinese.

In Colorado, school districts have lost thousands of students to virtual schools, and, in 2006, a state audit found that one school, run by a rural district, was using four licensed teachers to teach 1,500 students across the state. The legislature responded last year by establishing a new division of the Colorado Department of Education to tighten regulation of online schools.

The Wisconsin Virtual Academy has 20 certified, unionized teachers, and 800 students who communicate with one another over the Internet.

The school has consistently met federal testing requirements, and many parents, including Mrs. Weldie, expressed satisfaction with the K12 curriculum, which allows her children to move through lessons at their own pace, unlike traditional schools, where teachers often pause to take account of slower students. Isabel Weldie, 5, is in kindergarten, “But in math I’m in first grade,” she said during a break in her school day recently.

“That’s what I love most about this curriculum,” Mrs. Weldie said. “There’s no reason for Isabel to practice counting if she can already add.”

In 2004, the teachers’ union filed a lawsuit against the school, challenging the expansive role given to parents, who must spend four to five hours daily leading their children through lesson plans and overseeing their work. Teachers monitor student progress and answer questions in a couple of half-hour telephone conferences per month and in interactive online classes using conferencing software held several times monthly.

A state court dismissed the case, but in December an appeals court said the academy was violating a state law requiring that public school teachers be licensed.

The ruling infuriated parents like Bob Reber, an insurance salesman who lives in Fond du Lac and whose 8-year-old daughter is a student at the academy. “According to this ruling, if I want to teach my daughter to tie her shoes, I’d need a license,” Mr. Reber said.

Not so, said Mary Bell, the union president: “The court did not say that parents cannot teach their children — it said parents cannot teach their children at taxpayers’ expense.”

The Weldies and 1,000 other parents and students from online schools rallied in Madison, the state capital, urging lawmakers to save their schools. Last week, legislators announced that they had agreed on a bipartisan bill that would allow the schools to stay open, while requiring online teachers to keep closely in touch with students and increasing state oversight.

We need to contact our state representatives, our state senators, our city council persons, our aldermen…anyone in authority that will listen how wonderful this program is. The arguments on their side, (socialization, being tied to computer all day, funding with no results) are all things we can refute, and WE NEED TO. These schools consistently score higher on standardized tests, kids typically enjoy the school day more, and families have more time together. Families have more time together…in this busy world we’re in…what a concept.  Kids that are just a “little too sick” to go to school can still keep up, kids can work at their own pace to get ahead as much as they can. Our kids have the ability to finish the school year early in some cases. Our mastery curriculum offers kids the ability to “work till they get it” and be rewarded for effort put forth. That my friends is a real self esteem builder and something these talking heads in the State Capital need to hear. Join our coalition and find out how YOUR voice can make a difference.

This is also the time we line up for that quick glimpse, that chance to see and get what’s new and hot or trendy. Or the time we line up to hear the latest buzzword like “change” or “new” or “exciting”.

 This is the time when we are bombarded with offers all designed to lure and distract you with promises of being better than the other, who or what that may be.

You might think this is about the latest electronic gear or the newest game system, it’s not. We are the ones being played.

This is about the annual train wrecks called political campaigns. Nothing about this missive is meant to be partisan, but indeed a warning for all to be on their guard for promises made by the candidates and a “gut check” to remember how many other political promises made were ever kept. Also, this is a plea to check each candidate, their position papers, email them, ask questions and verify to the best of your ability BEFORE you give away your vote.

 Candidates on the threshold of power are adept at avoiding answers to questions, even direct ones.  They have mastered the art of redirect. (”I’m glad you asked that question, and I’m sure you meant to ask…)

We on the front lines of the virtual education battle have an even greater responsibility to do this with every candidate at the State and Federal level.  We “mavericks” in this battle can hopefully look down the road a few years when fighting for virtual education or its funding, will be a moot point. We are having huge successes with this program and want it to continue. We MUST ask every candidate their feelings on virtual education, they must be tough questions and if we elect candidate “A” over “B” based on their answers, we must hold their “feet to the fire” and make sure they know we voted them in and THEY work for US.

To be sure, this is not limited to our issue, but it is the one that must be uppermost in our minds this year and next. This is a habit we must adopt for EVERY ELECTION and for ALL ISSUES and ALL CANDIDATES.  This is also an educational opportunity for our students to see and understand a democracy and representative republic at work. They must understand how important and precious a vote is. hey must learn that by our vote, by our voice we can make a change, we can make a difference. Teach and lead by example on this issue, and in your daily life.

ROB