Underhanded plan to erode class-size laws

There’s a new proposal to raise teacher pay in Florida. Sounds swell. Pay here, after all, has long trailed the national average, often by about 20 percent.

A recent USA Today study found Florida ranks 43rd — behind states like Georgia, Kentucky and Louisiana.

It’s fine to trail Georgia or Louisiana in SEC football standings. Not in wages or education stats.

Low pay is one of the reasons 40 percent of Florida teachers quit within the first five years. (Well, that and too many testing mandates. And boneheaded bonus plans. And a general lack of respect from politicians who treat teachers like hemorrhoids.)

So, news that the leader of Jeb Bush’s education foundation has drafted a constitutional amendment to boost pay sounds great … until you read the fine print.

That’s when you see the proposal only provides money for teacher raises if Floridians first vote to lift the cap on class sizes and agree to stuff more children in Florida classrooms.

And even then, there’s no guarantee of how much in raises teachers would get.

In other words, if you want to maybe treat your teachers like something better than dirt, you have to first agree to go back to the days where you treated your kids like dirt. Happy voting, everyone! In some regards, the proposal by Patricia Levesque — the head of Bush’s Excellence in Education foundation and a member of the state’s Constitution Revision Commission — is no surprise.

Bush hated the idea of forcing the state to spend more on smaller classes.

Back when he was governor, he opposed the 2002 amendment and announced that, if voters passed it, he had “devious plans” to undermine it.

Actually, Bush didn’t announce his devious plans. He was caught divulging them to allies by a reporter with a tape recorder whom Bush hadn’t spotted in the room.

So now, 15 years later, we have Devious Plans 2.0.

Levesque says there’s nothing devious about her plans. She simply wants to give school districts more “flexibility” in meeting the class-size requirements, by allowing them to use averages.

Your kid’s math class could have 36 students as long as another math class has 13.

She says the teacher-pay part of her proposal is simply about making sure the money stays in the schools, the way voters want. Frankly, I don’t buy that. I think the teacher-raise proposal is just a gimmick — that Levesque knows there’s no way 60 percent of Floridians would vote for bigger class sizes. So she tucked a sweetener in there … a way to let backers run a campaign on a popular topic (raising

teacher pay) instead of the real goal (cramming more kids in each classroom).

If raising teacher pay were truly the goal, we’d see an amendment that proposed just that. But that’s not what this is.

Theoretically, Levesque is right when she says implementing the classsize amendment requires flexibility.

But we have been duped before on that front.

In fact, legislators have flexed the intent right out of the law.

The 2002 amendment, after all, was clear. It capped class sizes at 25 students for high school, 22 students in fourth through eighth grades and 18 in pre-K through third.

Still, Florida schools are full of classrooms that have 28, 32 and 35 kids.

How? Lawmakers created loopholes the size of Iowa (which, by the way, also pays its teachers more than Florida).

Lawmakers exempted electives and extracurricular classes from the caps — which sounded OK at first. I mean, 30 students in a PE class or 40 in chorus sounds reasonable.

But then lawmakers began reclassifying every class you can imagine as electives.

American literature became an “extracurricular.”

So did French. And Spanish. And marine biology.

Does your child have 38 kids in his AP math class? Well, that’s because flexibility-promoting lawmakers labeled all Advanced Placement classes as “electives” as well.

Math is a core class. An AP math class is not. That’s flexibility.

If education reformers went back to the intent of the law and required the vast majority of classes to meet class-size caps, we could maybe talk about tinkering with the constitutional language.

But legislators have already gutted this amendment. And this is just an effort to gut it even further by dangling the prospect of pay raises — which may not be fully realized and which the state should be providing anyway.