On this week’s episode of Students Over Systems, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush joins the podcast to discuss the history of the Sunshine State’s flourishing education options. Gov. Bush explains how he overcame opposition to education freedom and remained focused on improving K-12 education. We address the then-abysmal state of education in Florida before the state created school choice opportunities, and the tremendous improvement in Florida’s education system in the years since the governor introduced his A+ plan for education in 1999.
TRANSCRIPT
Ginny Gentles:
Welcome to Students Over Systems, a podcast that celebrates education freedom. I’m your host, Ginny Gentles. At Students Over Systems, we talk with the creators, advocates, and beneficiaries of education freedom. Our guests empower parents with more leverage over their children’s educational path. On today’s episode, we’re talking with Governor Jeb Bush. Jeb Bush was the 43rd governor of the state of Florida and served two terms from 1999 to 2007. Florida remains a national leader in education and is one of the only states in the nation to significantly narrow the achievement gap. We’ll talk through why and how that has happened. Governor Bush has authored or co-authored three books, and he maintains his passion for improving the quality of education for students across the country by serving as chairman of the board of directors of ExcelinEd. He lives in Miami with his wife, Columba, and they have three children and five grandchildren. Governor Bush, thank you so much for joining us today.
Jeb Bush:
Ginny, it’s a delight to be with you.
Ginny Gentles:
Okay. So Governor Bush, you and I have been at this school choice thing for a very long time, and I’m looking forward to talking through your longtime support for school choice and what you’ve accomplished in Florida. I took a look at your bio, even though I know your work pretty well, and it says that you are the first Republican in Florida history to be reelected. During your two terms, you championed major reform of government with a top priority of overhauling the state’s failing education system. And under your leadership, Florida established a bold accountability system in public schools and created the most ambitious school choice programs in the nation. So it seems to me that these two things are related. You were the first Republican in Florida’s history to be reelected and you overhauled education and created this robust accountability and school choice system in the state. How did Floridians respond to your education agenda when you were governor?
Jeb Bush:
Well, this is really interesting because in the here and now, campaigns and politics is about demonizing the other side, and not much about here’s what I want to do, here’s why I want to do it. So I’m old enough to, I don’t want to get nostalgic here, but I actually ran for office in an era where if you said what you were going to do, you could be rewarded. And so 1998, I ran for office with a detailed plan of what I wanted to do. Education was the first and foremost most important policy initiative in that suite of reforms. I went to visit 260 schools in a year, which is hard to do if you think about it, because schools aren’t open typically in the summer. So we were cranking out two a day. I learned a lot. I de-horned myself, Ginny, if you will, because in a previous campaign I called for universal vouchers and I was considered the devil incarnate here in Florida.
But just by showing that I cared enough and that I was willing to challenge, I was willing to have my views challenged and to go into the lion’s den, if you will. I think, and it became the number one issue. It created a mandate when I won and we had a chance to implement the plan that I proposed. And the legislature changed it a bit. But basically, it was the 1998 campaign platform. And I think it’s important for elected officials to do what they said they’re going to do. First of all, say what they’re going to do. A lot of people don’t even do that anymore and then actually connect the dots to get something done. And that’s what we did.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, and clearly it was warmly rewarded because you were reelected. And I remember you talking back in the day about those conversations, over 200 conversations around the state. They had a real impact on you. What were some of the messages that you were hearing when you were talking to folks around the state?
Jeb Bush:
Frustrated teachers, really frustrated parents. What my brother eventually called the soft bigotry of low expectations. It was prevalent all across the state. It was funny, you go into a school and if the principal knew, I always came unannounced. I didn’t come with camera crews or anything and they got a little nervous. I don’t know, sometimes it was a little difficult to get people to warm up, but they would always show me the AP class or the class where the tiny percentage of the kids that were excelling would go, irrespective of the system. And I started asking, “Well, show me the kids that are struggling. I’d like to go to their class.” And you get insights in how they were just cast aside, whether it was middle school or high school, even elementary school. It started early. The kids, some kids could learn, some kids can’t.
That was the mantra of the time. And I believe that God’s given the ability of every child to learn, and it’s up to us, all of us in a community, to organize ourselves, particularly parents, organize ourselves in a way to make sure that they do learn. And so a lot of my views were validated, and a lot of thoughts I had that were not as sensitive to the plight of people inside the system that were really struggling in a system that was not accountable. Great teachers would whisper to me, “Keep it going.” We really need a system that rewards excellence. Our kids can learn, but we need to change the system. We had a 50% graduation rate. Ginny, I’ll never forget. I tell this story all the time. I was in Seminole High School, a kid was preparing to take the eighth-grade-level achievement test to graduate from high school.
We were one of the few states that actually had a high school graduation test. It was eighth-grade level, and we were so proud that we had a high school graduation test. It’s eighth-grade level, though. I mean, come on. So this kid couldn’t answer. I was looking over his shoulder in the darkened, back when they had those pong-like computers. The question was, “Baseball game starts at three, it ends at 4:30. How long’s the game?” He couldn’t answer it. I mean, God, I mean, it was so heartbreaking. And there are thousands and thousands of kids that were cast aside like this. He didn’t graduate, I’m sure, from high school. And I don’t know where, Freddy was his name. I don’t know where he is in life today, but my guess is that he missed a lot of opportunities because he didn’t gain the power of knowledge and parents were pushed aside.
So I learned so much, and it put a human context around the nerdy policy ideas that a lot of people in think tank world talk about, but it has real-life implications for people. And then I got reelected, for sure, but our policies weren’t popular in the sense that they were controversial. We earned popularity by having rising student achievement. But that took four or five years. At the beginning, you got to stay the course, you got to fight, you got to push back. You got to threaten a legislator who gets weak-kneed. You have to bring people onto the playing field, business, community, parents, others. It was a full-time job inside of the government to push this agenda to make sure it worked.
Ginny Gentles:
Absolutely. Well, you might know this, but I went to Florida public schools from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade. And somehow in the pre-internet age in 1979, my mother was able to do the research to gather information and figure out which Central Florida school district was going to be the best fit for our family. And so she realized Dommerich Elementary, Maitland Middle School, Winter Park High School, this was the best combination of schools for us. And they chose their house, and purchased their house in a neighborhood accordingly. That was unusual in those days. Tell us about the A to F accountability system and how that provides information to parents that was really hard to find back when I was a kid.
Jeb Bush:
Well, a lot of parents that have resources will move to the best schools for their kids, for sure. And thank God your parents did that. But we created a system where it was easier for parents to know whether their school, their kid’s school was working. By a lettered grading system that was, it’s pretty easy to know an A is better than a B, better than a C, and a F is the worst. And then we put rewards around improvement in A schools with $100 per student going directly to the school with no cut in the bureaucracy. And if schools were failing, they could get a voucher back then and go to a higher performing public school or a private school. So it was the first state in the country to have a statewide voucher program. It was very controversial. We were taking money away from the public schools.
All the arguments you still hear today in states like Iowa is going to pass an ESA, God willing, in the next couple of weeks. And I can almost tell you exactly what the arguments against it are because they’re the same ones that existed 20-plus years ago in Florida. The simple fact is that parents need to be informed about how their schools are doing, their kids’ school is doing. And we provided a system that was pretty easy to understand. It was 100% based on student learning, half on gains, half on how they did to the standards. Then we provided incentives so that we got more of what we wanted and less of what we didn’t want. Life works that way, you provide incentives, you provide money for the right kind of outcome, and you get more of it.
And it created rising student achievement and it gave parents powers in the failing schools. And here’s the deal. This is what the opponents of parental choice and education consistently say is, “You’re destroying public education.” Florida is one of the leaders in the country in terms of student achievement because parents are empowered to make choices. Traditional schools have gotten a heck of a lot better. That 50% graduation rate is at 90% today. And it’s not really to brag, because a lot of those kids that graduate with a piece of paper aren’t really college or career ready. That’s the next big challenge is to make sure that college and career readiness is guaranteed when you graduate from high school. But all schools get better when parents are informed about the state of the schools and the options that they have, and the more options, the better.
And it’s an exciting time now in K-12 education across the country as more, and more states are embracing this idea. But Florida was one of the leaders, and we went from, just to put in perspective, the NAEP test is the nation’s report card, you know that. And we were 29th out of 31 in 1998, the year before I became governor. So we could whisper, thank God for Louisiana, and Mississippi, but we couldn’t say anything else. We were 50th out of 50 in high school graduation rate. People were saying, thank God for Florida there. And we went, in five years’ time, we went on the NAEP fourth grade reading test. We went to sixth out of 50 states. We’re a 60% free and reduced lunch student population, 60% majority-minority student population. All the mythology built around some kids learning, and some kids can’t, has been blown up.
Florida’s kids, Hispanic kids do better than the California average on that test. Black kids are top five in the country. Kids with learning disability, top five. Low income kids, I think, are number one now and have been consistently. So our system has yielded improvements across the board. And now there’s a pretty big constituency because we started this journey and then successive legislators have added choice provisions, to their credit, and governors have embraced the idea. So now Arizona, I guess, and Florida and a handful of other states have close to majority of their kids; their parents choose where their kids go to school, whether it’s a traditional public school, a charter school, homeschool, ESA, customized school environment, or private school.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, let’s go back to the beginning of this story. You and I met back in 1999 when you were testifying before the US House Budget Committee about your plan to introduce the A through F accountability system and this opportunity scholarship program. The opportunity scholarship program, again, for students who were attending schools that had received an F grade twice, these are persistently failing schools, that was small and then eventually, unfortunately, struck down by the Florida Supreme Court. But, while you were governor, you’ve mentioned the expansion of different programs, but you oversaw some of the creation, and expansion of school choice programs. So one of those was the McKay Scholarship Program. It’s now been folded into another program, and that was for students with disabilities. And then, there was the Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship Program for low income families. Tell us a little bit about the fight and the push to create those programs because it wasn’t easy getting the A through F grades and the Opportunity Scholarship Program. What was it like creating these two additional programs right on top of that?
Jeb Bush:
Well, the Corporate Tax Scholarship Program was passed before the Opportunity Scholarship program was ruled unconstitutional. So thank God it was because those kids had a chance to be converted, if you will, to the Corporate Tax Scholarship Program because all of them were, almost all, if not all, were low income, qualified for that program. One of the lessons learned about the Corporate Tax Scholarship program and now the ESA that we have is it’s really important to have good stewards of the program. And Step Up for Children, based in Tampa, John Kirtley, who’s a godsend to the state, and now the country in many ways, has built an incredible program to manage this growing suite of programs. And so sometimes when you start, there can be missteps along the way that the opponents jump on and say horrible things about, even though public schools have just as bad or worse problems.
I mean, sexual predators in schools, how about that? I mean, the unions protect bad workers in the K-12 system just as they do in other parts of their efforts. So we were successful on building on the initial success. And I think it leads to an important point, which is, success is never final and reform should never be complete. You build on your success. So the first suite of reforms created an opportunity for the next suite. We ended social promotion. We created the Corporate Tax Scholarship program. The McKay Scholarship Program actually didn’t get the opposition, interestingly enough, because I think, and I’m maybe cynical about this. But I think a lot of the public schools said, thank God, someone’s willing to take these kids that have learning disabilities or have IEPs whose parents are fiercely protective of them and will fight for them because they’re vulnerable.
Thank God they have another option. We don’t have to deal with them anymore. We don’t have to deal with the legal costs of defending the inability to take care of kids with special needs. So in Florida today, if your IEP, you’re under the Civil Rights Act in Washington, if your individual education plan is not being met, you can unilaterally take the state and local money and go to a private option. And I think 30,000 kids now take advantage of that. So these programs were hard to implement because they were controversial, but they quickly gained huge support and they gained political support from parents. Another lesson learned is once you start on this journey, it’s really hard. The unions get all upset. The bureaucrats threaten, everybody’s saying the world’s being turned upside down, but ultimately you build a constituency. And that constituency, in the case of Florida, is a lot of low-income moms and dads, a lot of parents with learning disabilities that had a chance to choose the school that they want their kid to go to.
And they’re not going to give it up. There’s no going back. And so whether it’s a charter school or private schools, we have Universal Pre-K, which happened under my watch, and 90%, so 150,000 kids get a voucher to go to a half day, four-year-old program, hopefully literacy based so that they can be prepared to go to kindergarten, and 90% of those parents choose a private option. So now we have this whole vibrant infrastructure around our children, and parents are the protectors of it. No politician would dare take it away. And the Supreme Court, thankfully in Florida, will stop intervening because we got a really good one now.
Ginny Gentles:
Yeah, thank goodness for that. I remember being in Tallahassee during that Supreme Court ruling for opportunity scholarships and you were not happy. No one was happy. So yeah, we-
Jeb Bush:
We expected it, though. And a secret squirrel point here is that we delayed as long as we could, the arguments in front of the Supreme Court because we knew what they were going to do. The ruling was so twisted and illogical, but that was our expectation. So we had three or four years to show that it worked and to protect the programs and create new programs around it. None of which had been challenged, by the way since then. So life’s good.
Ginny Gentles:
Life’s good for so many families and students. That McKay Scholarship program was combined with an ESA program. And last I checked, I think it’s the combination, is serving over 65,000 students right now with an average scholarship around $10,000. So you’re taking a lot of money and finding a school that meets your needs. And there are hundreds of schools that are participating in this program. So a lot of myths have been dispelled with these programs. You can’t say, oh, well, there are no private schools that will serve students with special needs. Absolutely not true. You have years and years of these programs existing in Florida proving quite the opposite. And then over time, I think Step Up for Students, that administrator of many of these programs, they’re now saying that they’ve served a million students because it adds up when you’re serving 100,000 students in one program, 65,000 in another each year.
And these programs are existing for many years. Many students and families are benefiting. No thanks to the Palm Beach Post. I showed up the last two years of your second term of being governor, and I ran the Florida Department of Education’s Independent Education and Parental Choice office, so the state’s school choice office. And so you guys had passed the programs, they were implemented, they were running, and the media was merciless, and the legislators paid a lot of attention. I wonder what kind of advice, you were saying that there’s going to be pushback on the ESA fight in Iowa. What kind of advice would you give to state legislators, to governors who are advocating for these programs and protecting these programs when it comes to the media storms that rise up around them?
Jeb Bush:
Well, it’s interesting. I think the media storms are now a media drizzle because they don’t exist anymore. I mean, we did watch, I would get, to put it in perspective as governor. I think I got 10 daily newspapers that were at the governor’s mansion at six in the morning, 10 of them daily. And I would skim to see what they were covering. And a lot of times they were covering things that I didn’t, mistakes we made or problems we had. Editorially, they were certainly attacking the accountability and parental choice programs that we had consistently. Palm Beach Post probably is the worst culprit, but they’re dead. So I’m not an expert on the current media environment. It’s probably stronger in DC, but at the state level, they really don’t matter anymore. So it should be easier to stay the course. And Florida’s a really good example of consistent reform policies.
As you know Ginny, we have, typically our Senate president and Senate speaker, the house speaker, served two terms, and there’s a team effect because you know who the next incoming speaker is, the incoming president, and then you know the one that’s going to come in three years, you know the one that’s coming in five years. And we have term limits. So we’ve had consistent reform leadership in the legislature, which is really important. And other than the last few years of Charlie Crist, one term, he was a Republican. He was a Jeb Bush. He called himself a Jeb Bush Republican in his first two years. Then he morphed into a Barack Obama. He’s confused. Let’s just leave it at that.
But the legislature maintained, these reforms, and then Governor Scott and certainly Governor DeSantis all have been big supporters. So that long-term commitment has proven that it works and that we have success. So look, I mean, people have every right to criticize programs and you just got to stay the course. It’s not that you ignore the press, but they’re not as important now as they once were. And their mouthpiece is muted, don’t you think?
Ginny Gentles:
Well, I haven’t heard anybody talk about the Palm Beach Post in a long time. And now we’ve got Corey DeAngelis, and other voices out there fighting strong and making sure that these school choice success stories are known.
Jeb Bush:
By the way, I follow him on Twitter. The dude is tweeting a hurricane daily, he’s going to have a neck problem. This is the new media, right? Is, do you have people that use the social media platforms to really advance their cause? And it makes a difference. It’s important to get the word out, and he does a great job.
Ginny Gentles:
So thankful for you and all that you did to launch a lot of these programs. And so thankful for Corey for defending and ensuring that they’re expanded. I titled this episode Opportunity Scholarships, which we’ve talked about, and BHAG. So as we wrap up, can you tell folks what BHAGs were and how that was a driving force while you were governor?
Jeb Bush:
Yeah, this was Jim Collins’ term. The BHAG is a big, hairy, audacious goal. And I think in public life, when you have a chance to serve, you shouldn’t be about cutting ribbons and checking boxes. You should be about big goals and then create strategies around implementing those goals and stick with it. Dogged determination matters because, look, in education, think about it, you have, when we started, we had 67 superintendents. Every one of them was likely to be opposed. They were opposed to the A-plus plan. We had the teachers’ union, they were opposed to it. The state board, the Department of Education, Ginny, at the beginning, was opposed to our initiatives. The legislature was concerned about it. And so we asked all these entities to implement a bold idea and to convert an idea into having rising student achievement and allowing kids to live purposeful lives at the end of this journey, you have to stick with it.
And so BHAGs are about creating strategies over the long haul. We eliminated social promotion in third grade. There’s probably 15 states that claim they’ve done it, but yet no one’s held back. There’s Mack truck wide loopholes. The threat was we would have 30% of our third graders held back in the first year of implementation. So what did we do? Well, a BHAG would require you to implement faithfully this idea. So we created reading coaches in every elementary school. We taught teachers how to teach reading because they don’t know. We eliminated the whole language efforts, which I think are insidious and dangerous, they still exist today. And we embraced the science of reading. We gave certificates for teachers that got extra pay for having a reading certificate. We held kids back, but we created all sorts of other ways to deal with remediation.
And we went from a third of our kids as below basic readers to, and 13% were held back the first year to now. The reason why we lead the nation in this fourth grade NAEP test is, we created a policy that over three or four years did not leave kids behind. So if you’re a low income kid in Florida, you have a much better chance of living a successful life because you’re a grade level reader by the end of third grade. They don’t do that in California. They don’t do that in New Jersey. They don’t do that in New York. They don’t do that in many places, and they spend double the amount of money that we spend. So where is it a better place to grow up? A state that is committed to BHAGs, or a state that is committed to protecting the adults in the system? I’ll leave it at that.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, as a Floridian, I definitely say that Florida is the better place to grow up. And as a supporter of the BHAGs that you implemented and a witness to that process, definitely my vote is for Florida. Governor Bush, thank you so much for talking with us today. I appreciate all that you’ve shared with us.
Jeb Bush:
Thanks, Ginny. Thanks for all you do.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, we hope that listeners found today’s conversation informative and encouraging. And if you enjoyed this episode of Students Over Systems, please consider leaving a review on your favorite podcast app. And don’t forget to share this episode with your friends. To learn more about the work of Independent Women’s Forum’s Education Freedom Center, of which I’m the director, please visit iwf.org/efc. Thank you for listening to Students Over Systems. Until next time, keep prioritizing students over systems.
