Jeb Bush Defends For-Profit Charters in Op-Ed
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush has generated a vigorous debate about for-profit charter school management with an op-ed for The Miami Herald in which he decried a provision in the fiscal year 2022 education budget that explicitly withholds federal funds from charter schools that contract “with a for-profit entity to operate, oversee or manage the activities of the school.” The piece was widely circulated by the Tribune News Service and is part of a wider campaign by the nation’s top charter school lobbying groups to block the Democratic proposal, detailed by Jeff Bryant in an article for AlterNet in July.
Democrats in the House argue that the provision is intended to curb the growth of for-profit education management organizations (EMOs), which operate under “sweeps” contracts to turn taxpayer funds for public charter schools into private profits, according to The Hill. Privatization advocates, led by Nina Rees at the National Alliance for Public Charters, have attempted to frame the provision as a blanket attack on underserved populations that utilize charter schools.
Bush blamed the “outdated mentality” of the “teachers’ unions and their allies in Congress” for threatening “education pluralism,” likening public education in the U.S. to an industrial age factory. He further opined that Democratic opposition to for-profit charter schools is motivated by a “fear that choice will lead to fewer students attending schools that fund [teachers’ unions’] private coffers.”
Aside from attacking teachers’ unions as greedy political machines, Bush claimed that the proposed budget will “specifically cut $40 million in education funding” and “undermine the education of millions of students, especially special-needs students who qualify for funding under the Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and students living in poverty.” Yet as Jan Resseger at the National Education Policy Center pointed out in her response to the Bush’s op-ed, President Biden and the House Appropriations Committee both propose an increase in “funding for wraparound Full-Service Community Schools from $30 million to $443 million, doubling the Title I funding for schools serving concentrations of poor children” and also “funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.”
Bush’s steadfast support for school privatization and open disdain for teachers’ unions is well established. His attacks served him well politically in his successful second campaign for Governor in 1998, according a 2015 profile of him in The New Yorker. After enacting the first statewide voucher program in the country and removing barriers to for-profit charter development in Florida as governor, Bush continued to advocate school choice by forming the Foundation for Excellence in Education, now called ExcelinEd.