Here’s what Jeb Bush really did to public education in Florida - The Washington Post

If you care about your child's education or your grandchild's, this is not the way to go.

Now that Jeb Bush is officially in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, expect his campaign to talk a lot about school reforms he spearheaded in Florida when he was governor from 1999-2007, and about his role as a leader in the national corporate school reform movement. You will hear about his reforms — standardized test-based “accountability,” for example, and “school choice” — along with claims of success in helping to transform schools. But there are big questions about his claims: Did his Florida reforms really accomplish what he says they did? When he talks about helping schools, which ones is he talking about?

Here’s what you won’t hear — and what is vital to know to fully assess Bush’s education reform record and to understand why his critics call him a privatizer — and not a reformer — of public education.

Here’s what Jeb Bush really did to public education in Florida - The Washington Post

See also:

The Big Jeb Bush Charter School Lie: Why His Florida Education ‘Miracle’ Is Hogwash

In 1996, Liberty City was the place Jeb Bush chose to introduce his big change — charter schools, the privately managed, publicly funded schools that operate outside the oversight of democratically governed school systems. Bush created Florida’s first charter school in Liberty City in an attempt to salvage a faltering political image by building credibility on both the education and civil rights fronts. But Liberty City Charter School proved to be much more than a campaign prop, sparking as it did a bushfire of charter school startups across Florida that continues to this day. Now there are over 600 charter schools in the state, and Florida's policies for charter school governance – ranked in the nation's top 10 by charter industry advocates — are touted as models for the rest of the nation.
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 As charter schools began to pop up here and there around the country, there’s no doubt Bush was aware of the trend. In fact, according to a recent article by Alec MacGillis in the New Yorker, the same year Bush founded his own advocacy group, he also "joined the board of the Heritage Foundation, which was generating papers and proposals to break up what it viewed as the government-run monopoly of the public-school system through free-market competition, with charters and private-school vouchers."