Governor Bush: Traditional public schools knock it out of the park in many places.
My guess is they'll continue to thrive the ones that are good.
And when you give parents choices, all schools get better.
They don't get worse.
They get better.
Nat: Governor Bush, thanks for joining us here at AEI.
Governor Bush: You bet, Nat.
Nat: So, I wanna sort of get to school choice in a minute, which is sort of my bailiwick,
but I'm curious to get into a little of your deep background as governor.
When you were governor, you did have big pushes on school choice, but you also had the A+
Plan, which had a lot of the hallmarks of, what we think of as accountability today.
But back before, it was cool.
So, can you just give me a thumbnail on that and what do you think were some of the biggest
successes from that early accountability?
Governor Bush: Well, this will sound like a bygone era, but when I ran for governor,
I laid out what I wanted to do in education.
I actually laid out the A+ Plan in detail.
It became the prominent dominant issue of the campaign.
My opponent attacked me for it.
I defended it.
I won, and it gave me a mandate to do it, which is a lesson that I think policymakers
and elected officials should remind themselves of from time to time.
Nat: And you were able to do it fairly quickly, right?
Governor Bush: First-year most of it.
So I went to visit 250 schools, kind of dehorn myself because I've always believed in vouchers,
which at the time was, you know, very dangerous apparently.
So the A+ Plan was we would grade schools based on student learning A, B, C, D, and
F. And if a school was an F, they would be given a voucher if they were F two years out
of four.
And if they showed improvement, they would get $100 per student directly to the school,
no cut for the state or the school district.
We eliminated social promotion, and the next year we created the opportunity scholarship
program, the corporate tax scholarship program, and the McKay Scholarship Program, which were
the first statewide voucher programs, kind of all within a two and three year period.
And it was a big damn deal.
I mean, it was tumultuous to say the least.
And the lessons learned were that you've gotta, A, fan your priorities first.
You can't have provocative policy without backing it up with money.
Two, you've gotta not just create in terms of accountability.
You can't just say, "Here are our expectations.
Now go do it."
You gotta help people that have never actually been held to account, and so we focused on
struggling schools and providing resources.
And the system adapted to this in a dramatic way.
Nat: One of my key questions is you put in a particular pretty toothsome requirement
that if third graders couldn't pass their reading benchmarks, they weren't going to
fourth grade.
And I'm curious about how that works in a large part because I see in a number of places,
we have really lofty ambitions and instead of seeing sort of toothsome requirements,
oftentimes, we see people budding their[SP] numbers to get, you know, sort of the numbers
[crosstalk 00:03:08] .
Governor Bush: You have exceptions that are Mack truck wide.
Nat: Yeah, exactly, so how would that go?
That's the first question, how'd that go.
It sounds like [crosstalk 00:03:14].
Governor Bush: We went from 32% of students being level one, which I would call functional
illiterate, below basic readers, to 14% in a two year periods.
But we had 14% of our kids held back in the second year, which is, you know, it's a pretty
provocative idea.
But the net result was that...so we created this gate, and so we're not kidding.
We're not gonna have big Mack truck wide exemptions.
But we did summer school again.
We put reading coaches in every school to teach teachers how to teach reading.
We gave reading certificates to teachers to get an additional pay.
We implemented early childhood education, all of which, you know, together created improved
literacy and lower a number of functionally illiterate kids.
It was in my reelection effort where had we not made those appreciable gains that I described,
had we maintained the status quo, had nothing changed, it would have been, you know, 25%
or 30% of all third graders stuck in third grade.
That would have been really ugly.
Nat: You know, since then, there's been a lot of accountability water under the
bridge.
We've had No Child Left Behind.
We've had the Obama era waivers, Race to the Top.
Now we're at ESSA.
We've had Common Core.
There's so many things.
Knowing what you know now and have learned about these lessons, what do you wish that
you had known back when you passed A+ that you didn't know then?
Governor Bush: You know, the A+ Plan worked.
In reality, there were imperfections for sure, but it worked.
So, one of the things that was so helpful was that we built a database in our state.
Researchers use it all the time to kind of study education outcomes on a longitudinal
basis.
We were blessed with a data bank that allowed us to adjust and kind of anticipate where
we would go.
So cut scores kind of turned out to be important in accountability.
Nat: Yeah, they do, huh?
Governor Bush: Yeah, really important.
And if you can kind of anticipate where you go so that you don't have a...you have a bell
curve instead of everybody's an A or everybody's an F, that's important.
And we had good data to be able to move us towards, you know, rising student achievement.
Along the way, there was a lot of wavering, not so much in my administration but after,
you know, there's always a reason not to move it up a notch.
You know, we've basically I think as a nation, we had some significant gains, not because
of me, but during my time as governor, many states had gains.
Now we've seen a kind of a flatlining because there's a push against accountability principally
because testing is, you know, bad, I guess, from the minds of people.
And the reason is that we overtest.
There's all sorts of tests that local school districts require that are part of the statewide
accountability system in these states.
And it's almost as long as it's designed to like end up...You know, we're really hurting
accountability.
So our foundation advocates fewer tests, more relevant tests, and more information from
those tests to turn it into a diagnostic tool.
Nat: That's interesting.
Let me ask you this, sort of juxtaposition as a bridge to the talk about choice programs.
A lot of public school accountability could be seen as increasing regulation on public
schools.
And then, on the other hand, we have private school choice proposals.
And a lot of the times we say, "You know, we need a light regulatory touch here."
How can you explain to people why you can hold both those things in your hands at the
same time?
Governor Bush: I don't think accountability is regulation.
Regulation is the number of, you know, cafeteria workers you have to have per X number of students
or imposing another mandate on top of schools because there was an isolated tragic case
of whatever.
That's the state mandates that local school districts are very right to complain about.
Accountability is actually liberating people.
You know, we tried to create an environment.
Look, we want rising student achievement, and here's how we're gonna measure it.
You go out and do your work and we'll fund it and we'll help you.
So, I would distinguish between traditional education regulation and accountability.
Now, the private...there is a friction in school choice programs, the private programs
because you don't wanna impose rules on top of private schools to make them basically
look like traditional public schools.
And we've always struggled what to do.
Do you test if someone takes public money?
Do you disclose it when there's only 10 kids?
You know, there's a lot of details in this and nuance that gets worked out different
ways by states.
But the basic premise is that you're transposing this top-down bureaucracy and rulemaking process
that's been around for 100 years in the traditional public schools to parents to make this decision
for themselves.
As long as you give them the right information and they know how their kid is doing, I think
that that's appropriate.
Nat: Right.
You support a number of private school choice programs, all of them and you support charters
as well.
I have a lot of folks who really like charter schools and they say, "You know what, charters
are enough.
Charters are enough.
We don't need these private school choice programs."
What would you say to them?
Why would you say we do need private schools?
Governor Bush: I've met a lot of people that are, you know, love high-performing charter
schools in the inner city, and there are some phenomenal schools that just really hit it
out of the park, but it's not a zero-sum game.
Advocating support of archdiocese schools in New York City does not hurt Success Academy.
It's truly not a question of one or the other.
In fact, they live side-by-side, and if they're both flourishing, all the better.
Nat: So we just had this event upstairs talking about Education Savings Accounts,
which I've spent a great deal of time studying.
I wanna ask you a couple of questions about those, but for the viewers that may not know
what they are can you just kind of describe them?
Governor Bush: Well, they vary, but they're basically accounts that parents receive.
They receive literally an account of money depending on what's appropriated to be able
to choose going to a private school or to break it up, disaggregate it as you said upstairs,
big word.
Nat: Yeah.
We like big words around here.
It's the main thing.
Governor Bush: Hey, I know.
Tutoring, you know, after-school programs, all sorts of other uses.
In Florida, the principle ESA program that is really successful is the Gardiner Scholarship
Program named after the former president of the state senate who was the sponsor of the
bill.
And now 10,000 parents or students, their parents get to choose from...they get I think
up to $10,000.
So it's a robust amount of money, and it can be to keep your child in the school, a traditional
public school but get additional services.
Those services, by the way, under the federal law should be provided.
But as you might know, the federal law isn't always implemented in a faithful way.
And a lot of parents are very frustrated that the public schools don't...their individual
education plan that the law requires be met isn't being met.
So this is a way for them to take that power and implement it on their own.
Nat: Sure.
And ESAs, our education savings accounts, ESAs are sort of the new kid on the block
as far as it comes to choice programs.
We have tax credits scholarships, and so I know we have voucher, traditional voucher
programs.
What is it that they bring that is just totally different than these other forms?
Governor Bush: The main difference is that you're empowering...the money goes to parents
to choose how they spend it on behalf of their children.
You know, there's restrictions, of course.
But it's different than a kind of a binary choice of going to the traditional school
that your kid was already going to or a private option.
ESAs give you the choice of going to a private school, staying in a public school and using
private services along the way.
So it's a much more dynamic flexible tool for parents to help their children learn.
Nat: Yeah, that's interesting.
It raises the question of the supply side.
We can do a lot about the demand side by giving families money and ways to use it that they
otherwise wouldn't.
But it's sort of harder to develop a supply side of providers who are gonna kind of meet
those demands.
If you just have school choice, well, it's obvious that schools rise up.
With ESAs, you need all kinds of different providers.
What have you seen in Florida and in other states in your work with the Foundation for
Excellence in Education that give you the confidence that the supply side will respond?
Governor Bush: Well, supplies or supply side always responds to demand.
I mean, it's kind of how free-market economics work.
Unfortunately, this is not a free market in the sense that if there's, you know, capital
costs or really principal cost for developing private alternatives.
And there you have to be creative and so if, you know, you gotta raise capital, you have
to identify buildings and provide support for that, it's a challenge.
But ultimately, what we found was that as our corporate tax scholarship program, McKay
Scholarship Program, Gardiner Scholarship Program went from literally zero to now 150,000
students that new schools were formed and supply ultimately met the need.
And there's still big waiting lists of kids that are trying to get into these programs.
Nat: Right.
Now, a lot of these programs are gonna be state programs, but they're gonna run into
the school finance structure, which is we have local dollars.
I've got some dollars from my state, and across the nation, there's about 10% federal funding,
45% state, 45% local.
Well, if you're state making rules with 45% of your money to try and provide real educational
opportunities for kids, you're stuck in a pretty good jam if you can't come up with
the funds to give people a valuable voucher or ESA.
Can you just speak to that challenge?
Governor Bush: Sure.
In the case of our programs, the principal, the largest voucher program is the corporate
tax scholarship program, and it's less per student than the traditional public school
option.
So, in effect, every child that leaves the public school to go to the private school
is saving the state money, and there's a growing understanding of that which sustains these
programs.
So on the one hand, you're...And in Florida, we have a merging of our local and state funding,
which just makes this much easier.
Nat: Yeah, it does.
Governor Bush: So, in the states that don't have that, you're gonna have to appropriate
money.
The Gardiner Program is a separate line item in appropriation, which gets to the basic
point.
If it's a high priority, it ought to be first funded.
You know, Washington doesn't work this way, but most states if a governor says, "This
is my number one priority," you take the first monies to fund your first priorities, and
so we never...we weren't constrained.
Other states, you know, where it's a big fight in the legislature, really are hampered by
this for sure.
Nat: I'm gonna ask you a question from your perspective as head of the Foundation
for Excellence in Education, so can you just tell our viewers what is the foundation and
what's its mission?
Governor Bush: Sure.
It was formed in 2007.
It started as a place where we could tell the Florida story, which is really a story
of choice, accountability, and a focus on early childhood literacy and the combination
of all this yielding rising student achievement, which is ultimately what matters.
But we've morphed into still telling that story, and we go state-by-state to policymakers
in the legislature and in the executive branch kind of forewarning them of the mistakes that
we might have made, which is always helpful, not to remake the mistakes that others have
made and encouraging them to be big and bold and providing support when they do and then
helping them and guide them on implementation.
This is complex stuff, so whether it's testing or just basically the science of reading or
making sure that accountability system is done the right way where it's not gonna blow
up in your face the next year.
We've had states that have ignored our advice in that regard and it blew up in the next
year and they had to start over.
We wanna be a trusted adviser.
We don't bigdog it, you know, show up at a place and take credit.
We operate typically with business, with chambers, and with local and state-based policy institutes
to do this in partnership always being deferential to the leaders that take the...you know, to
have to do the courageous thing which is to advocate whether you're a governor or a member
of the legislature.
Nat: Sure.
So taking Florida off the table for obvious reasons, what other state is just knocking
out of the park in terms of education, generally, but private school choice programs charters?
Who do you think's really doing great?
Governor Bush: I'd say Arizona has a robust charter school program in a burgeoning private
school program.
Governor Ducey is a big and bold leader.
Brian Sandoval did something extraordinary, but you know the legislature changed and I
don't think he got it off the ground to make it completely sustainable because there's
not enough scale yet.
But he had a full-throated ESA.
Wow, I mean that's the ultimate thing.
So huge credit for making that big first step.
Indiana has...it's kind of followed the footsteps of Florida and done some things even bigger.
Louisiana, although...you know there's...every state kind of ebbs and flows.
Tennessee has had big learning gains with a focus on teacher preparation and public
school choice.
So there are some good states out there.
Colorado is a place where actually bipartisan consensus has emerged from time to time, is
one of the few states where there's not a...
Nat: That still exist?
Governor Bush: Yeah.
Well, apparently in Colorado.
It's the water up there or maybe that new initiative that they've passed [crosstalk
00:18:02]
Nat: It's the elevation, maybe.
I don't know.
Governor Bush: Every state's different.
You know, Mississippi's a place where starting really from nothing, Governor Bryant's done
a really good job of...they've passed or they're passing an ESA.
There's big support in the business community and in the political leadership for meaningful
efforts there, and they're focused on reading.
They didn't have a charter school program until recently.
So depending on where you are on the spectrum of change, you know, these are big steps.
And we help each state kind of uniquely based on where they are.
Nat: So, you support vouchers.
You support online education.
You support ESAs, charter schools.
And these are all worthy of support, but they all do inevitably leave students away from
traditional school districts and neighborhood schools.
A lot of people will say, "Well, you know, that's because you hate neighborhood districts
and traditional public schools."
If that's not the case, you know, as these things grow and they succeed, what do you
see is the future for traditional school districts and neighborhood schools?
Governor Bush: Well, neighborhood schools particularly I think are going away because
they have broad support among moms and dads just because of the convenience and the safety
factor.
Parents have lots of reasons why they support their children going to particular schools.
It's not always the way the bing counters and the bureaucrats suggest.
And so, traditional public schools will always be well-funded.
Will there be a little bit of, you know, stress because the long-term pension obligations,
the sins of the past put pressure on school districts?
Yeah, but so what, you know.
I mean, if you go to some states, more money's being spent to deal with the pension obligations
decided 20 years ago.
Classroom education has languished even though they spend double what a state like Florida
spends.
Is that fair, the fact that we were more disciplined and in how we went about it.
Should we bemoan the fact that states are gonna have to make some adjustments?
No, I mean, that's part of what I think is an important element of a 21st century education
system, to move away from this industrial model that is failed in the private sector
and would have failed already in the public sector had it not been for all of us paying
our taxes to sustain something that's not as efficient as it needs to be.
But traditional public schools knock it out of the park in many places.
And my guess is they'll continue to thrive the ones that are good.
And when you give parents choices, all schools get better.
They don't get worse, they get better.
Nat: So, there's a number of private school or just choice options, right?
There's public school choice and charters.
We have ESA's tax credits scholarships vouchers and a number of different kinds of programs.
So let me present you with a false forced choice.
If you had to choose one to bet on, what's your favorite program of these?
Governor Bush: I mean, if you created a statewide ESA program and you created a repository of
options for parents and there was some degree of transparency about their effectiveness
and what the price was and all the things that a consumer of something of that importance
would need and you had accountability around it which would be different than the traditional
accountability so that parents would know what was working and what wasn't.
That to me would be the ideal situation.
I mean, if a girl could dream, it would be to turn parents, well-informed parents with
accurate transparent information into the school districts.
Nat: Yeah, it's a little bit of a chicken and the egg thing.
Of course, you can't have a vibrant marketplace of educational service providers without developing
an information system that gives feedback to consumers.
And, of course, you can't get that system up until you have the vibrant system.
But what do you think states should think about as they're trying to develop that and
trying to just grease those gears?
Governor Bush: I think that's what they need to think about is if you pass a voucher bill
or expanded charter, any expansion of parental, the parents are ultimately accountable for
their children's education you've gotta along the way, at the same time, simultaneously
give them a system of real information.
You know, as I mentioned upstairs, that's a place where generally the governments have
failed.
They just don't think that way.
They are insular in their nature.
They've never had to market.
You know, they never had to actually learn how to present something in a way that a mom
and a dad would understand how they're doing.
In fact, in some cases, they don't want you to know because, you know, if kids aren't
learning, it's not like a great conversation.
Nat: That's true, that's true.
Keep it quiet.
Indeed.
Governor Bush: Well, how you get to the place where, you know, you have someone graduating
with a high school diploma with an 8th-grade level reading capability.
How do you get to the point where a significant percentage, 40, 50% of kids are college and/or
career ready?
More than that actually they have to retake...if they go to college, they have to retake high
school reading and high school math.
The only way you do it is that you've kept it quiet because no mom would say, "Well,
that's great.
My little Johnny went 12 years and he's a 9th-grade reader, woohoo."
Nat: Yeah, not a lot to cheer about.
Let me ask you about advice for legislators or governors that are trying to develop an
ESA in their state.
Now, of course, these are gonna go through the push and pull of making legislation sausage-making,
and they have to compromise, sometimes on price, sometimes on how many people are eligible,
sometimes on what kind of regulation they're gonna cover.
Where would you say if you're developing an ESA bill you can't compromise on?
Where can they not afford to compromise on?
Governor Bush: I think it's making sure that there's going to be private providers opting
in, which means price.
It would be better to cap the number and go back to fight again the next session of raising
the cap but making sure that this amount of money while lower than the per student public
school it always should be lower than that.
But it's enough to be able to attract high-quality providers into the arena.
Nat: And so why would you say it should always be lower quality?
Not lower quality, a lower amount of money then what is spent in the local public schools
as I just following up on that.
Governor Bush: Why?
Because any transformation, you know, in life outside of government innovation normally
cost less and yields a better result.
And we should apply that model I think rather than the tidal model that cost more money.
More money isn't the leading indicator of a better result and plus politically, if you're
gonna go propose...I got this great idea, I'm gonna propose a voucher that is double
the cost of 50% more or 25% more than the per-student funding, by the way, because it's
private, we're not gonna impose all these rules on top of them.
So, you know, we don't know exactly if it's gonna be perfect.
You're not gonna get that passed in the state legislature.
Nat: A number of people that I know or I'm familiar with, they will criticize
private school choice programs on equity grounds.
They will say, "Well, you know, this is...the people who are gonna take advantage of this
are disproportionately white or rich or something else."
Governor Bush: The private school choice programs?
Nat: Yes.
And so how do you respond when you hear arguments like that?
Governor Bush: It's just not true.
It's not true at all.
Every data point suggests otherwise.
Most of these programs are taken advantage of by lower-income people.
The programs for children with learning disabilities are pretty, you know, across the spectrum,
both higher income and lower income, but there's no disproportionate that I'm aware of whether
it's charter schools or private voucher programs.
The exact opposite is true that people, because of how the programs are typically crafted,
people of lower-income benefit from these programs.
The issue that I think is important is to make sure that parents that are...you know,
a single mom that's struggling with two jobs and sees this as a chance for their child
to rise up and to be successful to go to a private school that they're informed, they
get the proper information, you know.
That to me is a bigger issue.
If you're in a more affluent area and you have the information available and you can
seek it out and, you know, you have a network of community that can just kind of by the
tom-toms tell you what teacher is good, what school is good.
If you don't have all that, then I think it's the obligation of the state to provide that
information to level out the playing field.
Nat: So private school choice has a friend in the White House and at the Department
of Education that they never really had.
You know, charters had support from the administration before but not private school choice.
But private school choice has grown in state capital after state capital, it has not been
Washington DC that's been pushing it.
So do you think that this new support from the administration is gonna be a change in
that and how might states, you know, make good on that new support in DC?
Governor Bush: Well, it could be that there's a...there'd be a federal voucher program emerge
in the welfare reform, the fight against poverty that emerges in Paul Ryan's world next...this
year.
I don't know.
That would be wonderful to include it because empowering parents that are near at the poverty
level with more choices in education would be a key element of that.
I'm a little wary of it only in that it should not hurt the existing choice programs that
exist across the country.
It should enhance them.
There should be enough flexibility that if the federal government wants to provide support
which states that already have these voucher programs and school choice programs would
love to have, it shouldn't be with so many strings attached that it stifles the work
that's already being done.
So my guess is that we'll continue on this path that this is really a state issue locally
administered.
The federal government has...with Betsy DeVos, certainly is a strong advocate of accelerating
school choice programs across the country and hopefully, she could be a partner.
But I cannot imagine a time when the Trump administration with Secretary DeVos' input
at least would make it harder for the existing choice programs to prevail.
Nat: Jeb Bush, thanks for coming to AEI and talk about us.
Governor Bush: You bet.
Thanks.
Nat: Hey, everyone, that's the end of our discussion with Governor Jeb Bush.
Thanks for watching.
As always, let us know what other topics you'd like AEI scholars to cover on Viewpoint.
And to learn more about Education Savings Accounts, check the links in the description
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