Education Reform in Florida: Diversity and Equity in Public Policy

5. Diversity, Desegregation, and Accountability in Florida Districts

WHY CONSIDER DIVERSITY? The state of Florida is experiencing concurrent trends in educational policy, the granting of unitary status to school districts that have been under court order to desegregate and the use of high-stakes testing as a means to hold schools accountable for student achievement. Not unlike school districts across the rest of the country, districts in Florida have gone to court to establish that they have eliminated vestiges of prior discrimination and should be declared unitary. At the same time, Governor Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan has been implemented in Florida to improve public education. The A+ plan is a three-pronged approach to improving education and involves commitments to provide greater accountability and improve student learning (as described in chapter 4), to raise standards and improve training for educators, and to improve school safety and reduce truancy. The A+ Plan relies heavily on high-stakes annual testing of students to grade schools and hold educators accountable for improving student learning. The underlying premise of the A+ Plan is that “every child can learn and no child should be left behind.”1 This premise is reflected in the more recent Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed by Congress, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002, and popularly known as the “No Child Left Behind” Act. President Bush concludes in his education policy statement that educational testing has the potential to narrow the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their peers.2 The focus on outcomes in the form of 117 CHAPTER 5 Diversity, Desegregation, and Accountability in Florida Districts Tamela McNulty Eitle achievement tests assumes that opportunities can and will be distributed equally. While court-ordered school desegregation has monitored the opportunities provided to African American children in Florida and elsewhere, its dissolution should not be seen as a signal that racial differences in opportunity have been eliminated. Chapter 2 describes the longer term history of segregation and desegregation in Florida. In general, studies of school desegregation have documented the nature of its implementation and resultant outcomes. Implementation of school desegregation plans at the school level within districts was seen as necessary to meet the needs of different communities, and the success or failure of school desegregation in a district (or overall) is often measured and interpreted differently depending on the political agenda of those doing the interpreting (lawyers, school officials, academics , students). Any educational reform, particularly in a southern state like Florida, must deal with the aftermath of legal segregation and subsequent efforts to desegregate schools. There is no question that many districts have put considerable effort into moving students to achieve racial balance in their schools, although recently some setbacks in this area have been noted.3 However, in other districts these efforts have met with little success or have been thwarted by educational policies that sort students within schools in ways that result in resegregation.4 Amid all of this, the granting of unitary status to many school districts heralds an entry into uncharted territory, the postdesegregation period. Governor Bush has largely discounted the history of segregation and demographic characteristics of schools as an important factor in public policy. In a July 2002 letter published in the Reader’s Forum of the Miami Herald, Governor Jeb Bush stated that a claim by a Miami Northwestern Senior High teacher that there is a “direct correlation between test scores, income level, and ethnicity” was false.5 Governor Bush also remarked that “while many schools with high rates of minorities are struggling, many are not.” 6 Governor Bush’s unwillingness to acknowledge a correlation between either poverty or minority enrollment rates and test scores seemed to stem from a concern that such a relationship would lead to negative side effects, such as lowered expectations for achievement, for poor and minority students. In fact he concludes the letter by stating his “hope that misinformation about a supposed link between race, income, and achievement does not lead a teacher to expect less from his students.”7 Indeed, it is unfortunate 118 TAMELA MCNULTY EITLE that the expectations that teachers have for their students have been documented by research studies to be related to factors including the socioeconomic status and race of students, but ignoring correlations at the school level between minority enrollment rates and test scores or between poverty rates and test scores will not make those relationships disappear. New reform, particularly new reform...