In Search of High Quality Education
Editorial Board
Miami Herald
Nov 30, 2009
OUR OPINION: Miami Dade College delivers even as state fails K-12 students
Two seminal events this month have captured the contradictions in Florida's struggling public education system: deserved national recognition for Miami Dade College President Eduardo Padrón and a lawsuit claiming the state is not delivering ``quality education.''
Praise and criticism
The praise for Mr. Padrón's stellar work elevating a public community college to a nationally recognized four-year institution and the criticism of the state's mediocre support for K-12 education are warranted.
Named by Time magazine among the top 10 Best College Presidents, Mr. Padrón has set into motion a philosophy that embraces each student's talents despite having them often arrive at MDC's doors as poorly prepared products of public schools. The majority of MDC students, in fact, need remedial classes before they can start taking college-credit courses.
Thanks to those efforts, MDC graduates more minorities and low-income students than any other college in the nation, and it has done so while raising academic standards.
Padrón was tapped to lead MDC in 1995, just three years before Florida voters backed a state constitutional amendment that was supposed to put public education from kindergarten to 12th grade at the top of the state's funding priorities. Instead, the state has been pushing that funding obligation onto already strapped local school districts. This year, the state's share of public-education funding was only 44 percent. In 2000, it was 62 percent.
Bipartisan effort
The lawsuit, filed by parents and students in north and central Florida and two grass-roots education groups, carries bipartisan cachet. Two of the attorneys arguing the case are former Florida House Speaker Jon Mills, a Democrat, and former GOP legislator Thom Rumberger.
The 1998 amendment calls public education Florida's ``paramount duty'' and requires the state to provide a ``uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools.''
The lawsuit should serve as a wake-up call for our elected leaders. Mr. Mills points out that the state has had a decade to show high-quality results, yet Florida continues to lag behind -- often at the bottom -- in inputs and outcomes. The results: funding for public schools (50th in the nation in state spending compared to its residents' wealth); teacher salaries (29th nationally); graduation rates (47th); safety for students (13th worst); and for teachers threatened by students (second highest in the nation).
Previous lawsuits leave in question whether courts can determine high quality, and the lawsuit's inclusion of FCAT requirements as burdensome may be over the top. But the basic premise is sound:
Voters made it clear a decade ago that education should be Job One. The governor and the Legislature have yet to deliver on that mandate.