EDUCATION

One of the most important issues to Floridians is improving our public schools. We can begin by strengthening Florida’s fledgling Universal Pre-Kindergarten program, keeping our commitment to reducing class sizes and recruiting the best teachers by increasing Florida’s average salaries to the national average. But I believe we must reform the FCAT and stop grading students, teachers and schools based on a student’s performance on one test, given one day. I believe we can better serve students by using the FCAT as a diagnostic test to help parents and teachers identify a student’s weaknesses before the end of the school year.

As Democratic House Leader, I supported a proposal that would have reformed Florida’s K-12 public schools. I also supported making a number of improvements to our community colleges and universities. The proposals I supported would do the following:

Keeping Class Sizes Small
This year, Democrats stood together to fight Republican efforts to repeal the Class Size Amendment. Studies show that smaller class sizes allow teachers to give students more individual attention. Parents and teachers have already expressed their support for reducing class sizes, and I will continue working to implement the will of the voters.

Reforming Florida’s Public Schools
As Democratic House Leader, I led the House Democratic Caucus, which promoted making the following improvements in Florida’s public schools:

Replaces Florida’s failed, FCAT-driven, public school accountability system with one that focuses on the academic progress of every student.
Makes the FCAT primarily a diagnostic tool to help parents and teachers understand every child’s strengths and weaknesses, not the sole benchmark used by the state to punish or reward schools, as is currently the practice.
Schools’ performance is based on a much broader set of measures than just the FCAT, including socio-economic factors, national assessment scores, demographics of the student population and others.
Every child who shows academic weakness in any subject is immediately referred for intervention and remediation services.
Our plan keeps taxpayers’ money within the public school system.
Our plan realizes that not all children start at the same point each year, thus children’s progress is measured on whether they make learning gains each year instead of whether they get a passing or failing grade on the FCAT.
Our plan directs more resources to low-performing schools for their improvement and provides accountability by requiring schools making “inadequate progress” to develop school improvement plans.
Finally, we require the state to adopt goals and allocate resources so Florida schools rank in the top half of most national rankings and in no instance have Florida rank in the bottom quarter of any national performance measure.

Community Colleges and Universities
As Democratic House Leader, I also felt that we must address our institutions of higher education. Pursuing education beyond high school into one of Florida’s community colleges or universities is becoming more necessary for students to succeed in the workplace of tomorrow. As Democratic House Leader, I supported the following proposals:

Expanding diversity in university admissions to give every talented student the opportunity to pursue a college degree.
Expanding community colleges to provide essential new job training and convenient classes for part-time students with full-time careers.
Increasing need and merit-based financial aid to allow more students the access to higher education.
Investing in our world-class research centers located at Florida universities and colleges.