My proposal for improving K-12 education in Florida | Opinion
Gov. Ron DeSantis has announced his intention to improve K-12 education. So, the usual education influencers are engaged in battle space preparation on behalf of their clients. The governor might pick his way between these competing interests; but he could do an end run around them and devote his attention and resources to those closest to the students. Directly and systematically empowering the parents and the school level employees in daily contact with the students will accomplish more for them than any of the usual programs.
In our schools, high levels of parental involvement are closely associated with high levels of academic achievement. A populist and bottom-up designed program could stimulate higher levels of parental involvement and academic achievement in Florida.
Managed from Tallahassee, this program would overlay the existing system of public schools so that neither separate new schools nor significant structural changes would be required. Fully implemented, it would immediately benefit 100% of all students. The projected annual cost of this proposal would be about $200 million for each of the first two years.
Within selected groups of 8 to 12 geographically close schools, friendly competition would be fostered by annually ranking them based on the total of three quantifiable and public measures: 1) an annual survey of parents’ evaluation; 2) the schools’ standardized test scores; and 3) a proxy measure of the level of parental involvement at each school.
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Geographic proximity would ensure that some staff members would have children attending other schools in the group. This would induce the rapid dissemination of the best ideas as well as competition between schools and collaboration within them. Ranking schools would preclude arbitrary upper limits of those measures. At the secondary level students would likely embrace the competition between schools
To reward performance and stimulate inter-school competition, the DOE would directly award financial bonuses to the school employees according to their school’s rank within the group. The rewards would not be large relative to employee annual salaries and the differences between schools of adjacent rank would be nominal. The chief motivators for school employees would be the competition between schools. For fairness the criteria for ranking schools would alternate annually between level of performance and rate of performance improvement.
Motivating and empowering teachers and school employees in this manner will bring out their creativity. There will be new ideas for curricula and pedagogy but old ideas out of favor with the education elites may also be tried. Successful ideas will be copied and improved upon within groups, then across groups and school districts.
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With motivation, the total creativity of over 140,000 Florida teachers and thousands of other school level employees will far exceed the best creative efforts of politicians and education elites. Empowering parents and democratizing K-12 education will likely draw the strong opposition of the education elites, the education schools, the school boards, and the unions. As the only elected representative of all Florida students, Gov. DeSantis will likely have to exercise his strongest leadership skills.
This proposal would 1) provide a means of measuring and promoting parental involvement 2) positively promote parents’ engagement in their children’s education and 3) stimulate higher levels of academic achievement. Involved and empowered parents will ensure that Florida’s K-12 students get the superior education they deserve.
Jay Stannard, a retired program analyst, lives in Palm Bay, Florida. He holds a I have a bachelor's degree in economics, an MBA from the University of Florida and a master’s degree in political science from the University of Central Florida. His three adult children all attended and graduated from public schools in Brevard County.