Legislators should work with school boards, not poison them with politics
Florida school districts need more support from state politicians, not more politics.
Yet a proposed constitutional amendment would make all school board races partisan. Florida’s public schools already are dealing with the new COVID-19 surge. They don’t need a new political surge.
The sponsor of the legislation is Rep. Spencer Roach, R-North Fort Myers. “Parents,” Roach said, “are outraged by the radicalism of the entrenched educational establishment, and incumbent school board members across the country will see a reckoning of historic proportions at the ballot box in 2022.”
Translation: Some school districts have dared to defy Gov. DeSantis and the entrenched Republican radicalism by setting policies that emphasize the safety of students. Some districts have dared to suggest that students benefit from studying race issues. Some districts actually prioritize traditional public schools over charter schools.
According to Republicans, it all must stop.
In 1998, Florida voters changed the state constitution to make school board races nonpartisan. The change made sense at the time and still does.
In an ideal world, there are no Republican or Democratic issues when it comes to education. Some of South Florida’s most capable school board members never made their political affiliation an issue.
Florida has not been in that ideal world for some time. It began in 1999, when Republicans gained full control of Tallahassee. New Gov. Jeb Bush began setting policies aimed at privatizing public education.
Those policies have continued and expanded. This year, the Legislature and Gov. DeSantis expanded the private school voucher program to include families that are middle-class and above. Originally, the program was to be only for low-income families.
More recently, however, Republicans have tried to move from control of statewide policy to control of local policy. Rather than allow each district to set rules on masks, Gov. DeSantis has sought to prevent school boards from enacting mask mandates, just as he rendered cities and counties incapable of creating measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19.
DeSantis made clear in June his intent to politicize school board elections. “We’re not going to support any Republican candidate for school board,” the governor told Fox News, “who supports critical race theory in all 67 counties or supports mandatory masking of school children.”
DeSantis added, “Local elections matter. We are going to get the Florida political apparatus involved so we can make sure there’s not a single school board member who supports critical race theory.”
No school district had included critical race theory in its curriculum before DeSantis got the Board of Education to ban it. DeSantis is pushing his own indoctrination even as he complains about indoctrination.
Republicans like to claim that they are about choice for parents on their children’s education. This amendment, though, would reduce choice for parents when deciding who will oversee public schools.
In nonpartisan races, all voters can cast ballots, regardless of party. That’s how it is for judicial elections. If no candidate in the primary gets more than 50%, the top two finishers advance to the general election.
Partisan primaries exclude Democrats or Republicans if their candidates aren’t on the ballot. They also exclude voters with no party affiliation.
In theory, all voters are eligible if all the candidates are from one party. In practice, both parties close primaries to all but their voters by using write-in candidates. It’s a sham, but the Legislature has refused to propose an amendment that would close the loophole.
Primary turnout is always much lower than that of the general election. Last year, it was 28% in the August primary and 77% in November, when the presidential race was on the ballot.
Primaries attract the most extreme voters from each party. Roach’s proposal would empower candidates with narrow agendas over those concerned about how children can best learn.
“There is now a clear partisan divide,” Roach said, “over issues of critical race theory, mask mandates, bathroom policies and school choice. … Knowing the political affiliation of candidates should be a fundamental right for all citizens in a representative democracy. Why should we hide this information from voters?”
In fact, candidates have ways of making their party affiliation known to voters. Next year, we may see more of that. But most candidates run on core education issues, not the sideshow cultural issues that Roach embraces, such as his fight with the Lee County School Board over bathroom policy.
Fortunately, there is no Senate version of the bill. And even if the Legislature passed the bill, it would only place it as a constitutional amendment on next year’s ballot. If at least 60% of voters approved it, the switch would take effect in 2024.
Roach presumes that Florida’s schools need more of what Tallahassee has been sending. He’s wrong.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.