Education a Major Focus as Legislatures Convene

As education legislative sessions ramp up across the states, looking at some areas of concern and direction can help foreshadow what might unfold during the 2024 legislative process. Doug Mesecar and Jim Horne sat down with colleague and fellow Strategos Partner Tara Reid-Cherry at the Excel in EDD Conference as part of their To the Point podcast to examine a few key areas of legislative interest.

 Doug Mesecar sets up the discussion, calling on Tara Reid-Cherry to offer insights from her expertise in the Florida legislative environment. At the same time, Jim Horne adds his Florida and national perspectives along the way. Together, the conversation examines screen time's impact on students, school safety, technology in the classroom, school choice, plus the challenges of education policy implementation in Florida and beyond. 

Screen Time, School Safety, and Technology Needs

Doug Mesecar: During his Excel in EDD keynote, author and social psychologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt talked about how screen time impacts the lives of students, teenagers, and kids. He provided some thoughts about how we could potentially start to approach this challenge. Why don't we start there and get Tara’s take on what's happening in Florida? And then more broadly, Jim, on what's going on with this issue nationally.

Tara Reid-Cherry: I look back on many of the Excel and EDD conferences, and Jon’s address on hate speech that he did in 2019 in San Diego was fascinating. In Florida, I think that speech inspired a lot of legislation to ban devices in VP and K-12. When you think about the implication, I’m reminded of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school incident in Florida.

From a school safety standpoint, you're going to have a lot of parents who struggle with the idea of not being able to reach their kids on a cell phone, should that time come. We have to figure out a way to empower teachers to get cell phones off the desks, but maybe not ban devices entirely in the classrooms because there's relevant technology that kids need to use.

Doug Mesecar: So Tara, you touch on a key tension, school safety, and the improvements we've made on making everyone aware of what's going on. However, kids live digital lives, Jim. How do we tackle this issue? Can we do this through policy or regulation?

Jim Horne: We can, but we need to be careful. You certainly don't want to blunt the impact of technology because it’s significant when harnessed correctly and adds tremendous value. There are conversations around addiction to screen time, such as in the book Glu Kids. We can all look into our personal lives and iPads being grabbed by kids rather than going outside to play. There is an unhealthy element.

At the same time, we need technology. It's a way to get research. I don't like how technology and screen time are all lumped together. After all, there are online schools and research, but that is not the addictive side. Kids are addicted to the social side, social media, and the games they play. We may need some policies that can discourage that part but, at the same time, not blunt the use of technology.

Tara Reid-Cherry: I recall the author of Glow Kids came to Florida and spoke to a committee about the data, and members were asking him how to legislate to ensure that kids were not addicted. But if you happened to watch that committee in action, every member picked up their phone at least twice. So we're legislating and trying to get kids not to be addicted to social media. But we, as adults, are not doing this, and we are the kids' first influence. So, legislating children's behavior will not do much until we put down our cell phones and step away.

Doug Mesecar: Setting and implementing rules and regulations in practice can be wildly different or challenging. So, policy must be thoughtful on this topic of devices to find productive ways to address this issue.

Implementing Policy and Florida’s HB 1

Doug Mesecar: Let’s turn to implementing policy. Florida is one of the nation's leaders in school choice, having evolved and grown HB 1 (House Bill 1) since last year. Tara, you've known all about that. So, tell us briefly what HB 1 did. Why does that put Florida in the lead nationally on school choice? And then, beyond the policy, how's it going about a year later? Are there benefits appearing? Or are there some challenges cropping up?

Tara Reid-Cherry: HB 1’s expanded ESA (Education Savings Account) in Florida is roughly in the $8,4 range per family, allowing parents to use that money for tutoring, tuition, and homeschooling education. It gives choices to families on how they can use this money with no income threshold, acting as a new change and challenge.

The implementation side is where things become complicated. We've seen and heard from families and vendors that distributing the funds to these families has become a real challenge. They're struggling to get that money efficiently. And until they receive the money to make a choice, we're not implementing statewide choice in reality.

One of my concerns is the “no income thresholds” added to the process. This started as a scholarship for low-income families. And while expanding to everyone is a nice option, if we're not getting families the money in a timely fashion, those low-income families must go out of pocket for the $8,400. That might sometimes represent a quarter of their annual take-home income and an upfront cost they can’t afford.

Jim Horne: Governor Bush, my former boss and a preeminent leader on education issues, reform, and parental choice, addressed the capacity issue that needs resolving. Often, families want to use dollars to buy tuition at a private school. But there's roughly 10% capacity and private schools in Florida. That means there's a limited number of seats.

 It can also frustrate parents who now think they have a choice to buy private school services when no seats are available. So, there's a big difference between the ESA and scholarship or voucher models. The voucher model is one single check transferred to a private school, but an ESA model is millions of accounts with lots of small transactions. The volume is incredible, and the infrastructure necessary to manage that process is significant and different. The struggle in Florida should find a fix. Technology will play a part in it. Yet, the real challenge is opening more capacity in private schools to assume this responsibility and obligation.

Tara Reid-Cherry: Added to that, we must incentivize private schools to accept scholarships to expand. However, they won't do that if it takes six months to get a tuition check. They won’t go into debt to create a school unless we make the process right for them to be able to pay their teachers.

Doug Mesecar: There’s obviously tension between a good idea with positive traction getting caught in policy, where the messy reality on the ground becomes forgotten. There's a thing called implementation science. It’s boring to most people, but it’s where the rubber hits the road and how policies are often crafted, as I witnessed at the federal level.

Once a policy is implemented, it looks different from the original idea. Sometimes, it’s written so tightly that it becomes difficult to adjust to the challenges on the ground in real-time. We have to write good policies with great people attached. Sometimes, early lessons from implementation are not a sign of failure. They're a sign that changes are being made to a system historically resistant to change, right?

 Jim Horne: Yes, it’s a glitchy process. I was part of enacting policies in the 90s, and then, when I became commissioner of education in 2001, my job was to implement them. Implementation was ten times harder than passing the policy in the first place. Policy is often thought up in theory. It’s contemplative. Practice is much harder than theory. We shouldn’t be too critical of the snafus; they will get fixed over time. It will probably take about a year or two to improve the technology in the movement of funds. However, the big capacity challenge will take four to five years to resolve. 

Doug Mesecar: Let’s close on this. Tara, looking into the next year and the Florida Legislature, knowing how much time you spend with legislators, what is their focus? Are they looking at implementation? And then, more than that, what are they looking to build upon as they start to see this policy rollout?

 Tara Reid-Cherry: There will likely be a focus on looking at the HB 1 process and seeing how the funds are distributed, how they are getting them to parents, and how parents are enrolling. That is the focus of most of the education members right now. In the Senate, there will also be an emphasis on how to make public schools more competitive. If we're investing in private schools and school choice, we should also consider how we allow public schools to compete. That's going to be a pretty interesting conversation.

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Visit the To the Point podcast (part of the Strategos Podcast Network) to hear more from this conversation and many other insightful discussions with Doug Mesecar and Jim Horne.