Policy Update: Florida: Flush With Cash

Vital Statistics
67	Public school districts
2,790	Public schools
2.3 million	K-12 enrollment
43.3%	Minority students
24%	Children in poverty
13.4%	Students with disabilities
$12.6 billion	Annual K-12 expenditures (all revenue sources)

Although a Republican proposal for a $50 tax rebate for property owners withered under a gubernatorial veto, district officials say they're benefiting from the surplus funds through an increase of more than 5 percent in the general state operating budget for schools.

"We have to thank our legislators because they were wonderful to us," says Henry Fraind, a spokesman for the 347,000-student Miami-Dade County schools.

Given the healthy economy and a $2.5 billion tobacco settlement, legislators could have pumped more money into the school funding formula and supported a proposal by Frank T. Brogan, the outgoing education commissioner who was elected lieutenant governor last fall, to expand professional-development opportunities for teachers and administrators, says Cathy Kelly, the assistant director for government relations for the Florida Teaching Profession-NEA, an affiliate of the National Education Association. "The money was spent on lots of stuff other than education," Kelly says. "The priority was not education. The priority was keeping everybody happy in an election year."

Meanwhile, on the election front, Republican Jeb Bush won November's governor's race, replacing outgoing Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles. Bush, who ran on an education-centered platform, backs a plan for granting students in low-achieving schools vouchers to pay private school tuition. In addition, a bipartisan group of three state lawmakers started crafting their own, expanded voucher proposal in October.

Having set higher standards for schools and districts in past sessions, lawmakers last year focused on providing professional-development incentives to improve the quality of the state's teaching force.

After rejecting a proposal to provide merit pay to 5 percent of the teachers in every school district, based on peer and administrative review, the legislators embraced a plan promoting teacher certification through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Of the 30 states that offer teachers some type of incentive to obtain national board certification, Florida's plan is the most comprehensive, according to the board.

The legislature appropriated $10 million to pay $1,800 of the $2,000 application fee for every qualified teacher interested in pursuing national certification. Any teacher who dropped out of the program, however, would be responsible for picking up the tab.

As a further incentive, the state is offering a 10 percent pay increase, at an average of $3,500 a year, to every teacher who attains national certification. Those certified teachers who agree to mentor other faculty members are promised an additional 10 percent salary boost. Because only 22 teachers in the state have national board certification and the process takes about a year to complete, legislators acknowledge that the state won't reap any widespread benefits from the initiative for some time.

Still, teachers' initial reactions have been overwhelming, according to Kelly. "Our phones have been ringing off the hook about it," she says. "You're talking about a lot of money for people who don't make a lot of money."

Meanwhile, the issue of merit pay remains very much alive. In another sign that lawmakers are serious about rewarding the state's top teachers, legislators say they're looking to expand a law that requires districts to allocate an unspecified portion of their budgets to such pay.

Although the requirement went into effect during the 1997 session, many districts have made only minimal efforts to include merit pay in their pay schedules, largely because lawmakers did not offer any state money to support the mandate, school officials say. But if districts don't do something more meaningful during the 1998-99 school year, "legislators will come back and tell them what percentage they need to spend on merit pay," says Sandi Harris, the director of legislative affairs for the state education department.

State education officials also had an opportunity to crow about the impact of the accountability measures first instituted in 1995 when they wiped clean a list of low-performing schools last year.

All 30 schools that had been placed on the list in fall 1997 because of their low test scores on norm-referenced writing and mathematics tests shed that dubious distinction last June by posting substantial improvements on at least one of the tests.

Only four schools were newly identified in November as posting academic performances low enough to put them on this year's list--quite an improvement from 1995, when 158 schools were singled out as low performers on the state's first such list.

"We were confident that the state's first efforts at accountability for school performance would bear fruit, but the progress made over the past three years is far beyond even our most optimistic expectations," Brogan, the then-state education commissioner, said in a statement issued last fall.

The state set about raising expectations for schools when state board members voted unanimously in November to pass provisions that set school- and student- achievement levels on a harder state test, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Starting with a phase-in period this spring, the FCAT will replace norm-referenced tests as the backbone of the state's accountability system.

Meanwhile, to provide high-performing schools with a financial incentive to sustain high achievement levels or make exemplary improvements, the legislature for the first time also appropriated more than $5 million last year to pay for a school recognition initiative that went unfunded in 1997.

To be eligible under the initiative for annual grants of $150,000 to $300,000 per school for faculty bonuses or new educational materials, districts must also incorporate some type of performance-incentive program into their salary schedules.

The legislators also loosened state regulations on charter schools, doubling the number of such schools allowed in each district and allowing them limited access to public dollars for school construction and repairs. Districts with more than 100,000 students are now allowed to have up to 28 charter schools; those that have between 50,000 and 100,000 students may operate up to 20 charter schools; and districts with fewer than 50,000 students may have up to 12 such schools.

With the memory of the state's $2.7 billion commitment to school construction and repairs fresh in their minds following a November 1997 special session on the issue, lawmakers last spring debated the merits of reducing class sizes and, thereby, creating a need for more classroom space. Steering clear of a state mandate to reduce class sizes, the legislature instead chose to adopt language requiring that at least one school in every district have classes in grades K-3 with a student-to-teacher ratio of no more than 20-to-1.