“De-regulated” Jefferson County - freed from grifters, MGT, and Jebism - surges on the corrupt scoreboard

And a federal grand jury could drop the hammer any time on some of the biggest, worst names of Florida's state education establishment. The pro public education counteroffensive is happening.

See the local Jefferson news source here.

The bottom line: liberated from the malicious interference of Florida’s corrupt state government and education establishment, bolstered by hard won resources, the reborn public schools of Jefferson County crushed the school grade performance of the failed, politically-connected charter school company that spent five years cheating and failing the kids of Jefferson County.

The exit of that company — and the gross state grifting that came with it — is now the focus of a federal grand jury. More on that in a moment.

School grades are still fraud; but narratives matter

But first, let me stipulate what I always do: school grades are rank fraud designed to sort, punish, and exploit families who lack access to capital — families like those who attend Jefferson County schools. They are political, not educational, tools.

We should eliminate school grades yesterday and return to the business of developing individual human beings to the greatest extent we can. We should never celebrate a school or district grade. It makes us complicit in malicious, anti-child, anti-community fraud. In a vacuum, Jefferson’s rise to “C” means absolutely nothing as an evaluation, beyond officially freeing it from some state school torture lists.

But as a narrative, it means everything.

It is death for everything the Jeb Bush empire has stood for and produced since 1999 — which is mostly America’s worst state education system, public and private. Jefferson’s rise offers a glimpse of what Florida could be if we cast off the rot of what is and start anew, simplified, with dedicated adults who care about developing all children.

Thus, I will make a rare exception today to heartily congratulate the dedicated educators and kids and community of Jefferson County — led by K-12 principal Jackie Pons and Superintendent Eydie Triquet.

They beat the grifters on their own corrupt scoreboard this year and struck a blow for all of Florida’s kids and communities.

The counteroffensive is suddenly everywhere

Apart from the Jefferson rising narrative, I still don’t think people have internalized just how giant a political and education story the looming DoE/Jefferson grand jury is right now — and how much larger it could become at any moment.

The last three Florida Commissioners of Education are neck deep in the scandal under federal investigation. Two of those three were also pillars of the corrupt Florida state government over the last decade. They are:

• Richard Corcoran: Former Speaker of the House, who oversaw the whole corrupt bid process at the heart of the scandal, which was set up to benefit his old business partner Trey Traviesa before it all came crashing down. Corcoran is now the vastly overpaid president of the “anti-woke” grift formerly known as New College.

• Jacob Oliva: As Corcoran’s chancellor, ordered a subordinate to create bid specs for a supposedly competitive Request for Quote (RFQ) based on a draft agreement with Traviesa’s company, MGT. Oliva, who was the interim commissioner between Corcoran and Diaz, is now the top education official in Arkansas.

• Manny Diaz: The current Commissioner of Education worked for the charter company school company (Academica/Somerset) that grifted and failed the children and people of Jefferson County. As a state senator, he steered the 2016 charter contract and tons of extra money to Academica/Somerset as part of the failed Jefferson takeover.

And Ralph Arza, the state’s most prominent — and grossest — charter school lobbyist is a star of a subpoena issued by the grand jury over the summer. He had multiple relatives working for the charter company in Jefferson. He and Corcoran are bros for life — until they’re not. Loyalty and grand juries don’t mix well, I suspect.

If we wake up one day soon with any combination of those bolded names on the business end of the federal grand jury’s wrath, we will wake up in a different, better era in Florida education and government.

Ziegler-ism and Jeb-ism are both on the defensive

In much the same way, Sarasota’s community and public schools have already entered a different, better era post Ziegler-gate.

Read the language used on the cross partisan resolution calling on Bridget to quit. We’re back to caring about all kids, putting aside politics, etc. The brief, gross Moms 4 Liberty moment is dead.

In truth, it was dead before the Zieglers and their sexual cruelty toward a depressed, substance-addled “friend” deservedly ruined them. Their hideous, abusive fun just dropped the decaying body of their “movement” out of its coffin for the whole country to view with horror.

At the same time. Sen. Corey Simon, R-Tallahassee, (who represents Jefferson County) and the Republican Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, are publicly pushing for “de-regulation” of Florida’s public schools.

The most significant and far-reaching proposal for Simon’s “de-regulation” is to end mass third grade retention based on reading test scores.

Mass 3rd grade retention is child abuse disguised as policy.

It exists only to:

• Help Florida cheat on the 4th grade NAEP test before its fake early scores collapse in later grades.

• Sell vouchers to children and families — “test refugees” — who don’t want to be held back in public schools.

I wrote about this in great detail in the Tampa Bay Times earlier this year. Thus, getting rid of mass third grade retention isn’t really “de-regulation.” It’s “de-griftalation.”

We’ll see how willing Simon and others are to really fight the people who “over-regulated” Florida schools in the first place — the grifters of Jeb World.

Jeb and his people are far longer-standing, more destructive, and more formidable enemies of public education than “Moms for Threesomes” could ever think about being. They are also deeply connected to the Jefferson scandal through Arza and Academica and other threads.

So it’s hard to overstate how generationally provocative it is for a Republican senator, backed by the Senate president, to say publicly that mass 3rd retention should go — and then legislate for it. It is slapping Jeb Bush in the face with a glove and challenging him to a duel.

Pay no attention to all the nice things Simon and company will say about Jeb. Doing away with mass 3rd grade retention rips the beating heart out of Jebism, as everyone in education policy circles knows. Mass third grade retention is a foundational Jeb world grift. It lies at the heart of Jeb’s toxic “legacy.”

Thus, “de-regulation” is an existential threat to Jeb’s undeservedly exalted sense of himself. So is what happened in Jefferson County. He won’t — and isn’t — going quietly under this attack.

But Jeb is a boomer has-been; education politics are narrative politics; and it was never easy to move Corey Simon off the line-of-scrimmage. De-regulation of Jeb’s toxic over-regulation is a thematic bell that will be difficult, if not impossible, to unring moving forward.

And if Simon manages to rid our state of this abusive scam, he will immediately become Florida’s best education lawmaker of my adult lifetime in Florida. (He will also challenge Charlie Ward and Warrick Dunn as my favorite Nole.)

Jefferson is the most potent possible object lesson for the benefits of “de-griftalation”

And Jefferson County, his own constituents, just gave Corey Simon a powerful weapon.

Jefferson is an object lesson in the harms of grift disguised as “regulation” and the benefits of getting Jeb Bush, Richard Corcoran, Manny Diaz, Ron DeSantis and all the rest of the grifter educrats the hell out of our communities, schools, and classrooms.

No school district in Florida has been more mutilated by regulation and grift than tiny Jefferson, which is really one co-located K-12 school. If you’re a regular reader of mine, you know the DoE/Jefferson story. Full timeline at this link. But here’s a quick summary:

Based on Florida’s corrupt school grade system — and boosted by the Pulitzer-winning “Failure Factories” malpractice of the Tampa Bay Times — the state of Florida in 2016 decided to seize control of Jefferson County schools and turn them over the Manny Diaz’s employer, Academica, which owns a charter operator called Somerset.

Academica/Somerset failed completely and bailed on Jefferson after five years, leaving Jefferson far worse off on the testing scoreboard than before it came. Its final year’s effort produced this:

As Academica/Somerset left, the Florida DoE, using state “regulation” as an excuse, sought to pick the bones of the Jefferson carcass by forcing Jefferson to pay millions to an “external operator.”

Bidding for that contract was supposed to be open and competitive; but Florida Department of Education, under Richard Corcoran’s oversight, seemingly rigged it for a company called MGT, which is owned by an old Richard Corcoran business partner.

The entire process blew up when DoE official Melissa Ramsey and Board of Education Member Andy Tuck submitted an illegal and unexpected bid for the same contract that was greased for MGT. The state “investigation” didn’t even look at the MGT bid until public complaints forced it go through the motions. It cleared all the powerful people without questioning them.

Now, seemingly, the feds are looking into every aspect of the Academica/Somerset takeover/departure in Jefferson, not just the MGT bid shenanigans. The federal money that public schools receive creates broad federal jurisdiction, in my understanding of the law. I’m going to update and speculate a bit on the status and focus of the grand jury in a future article.

After the scandal blew up, DoE persisted in trying to control the extra money it had committed to Jefferson schools when Academica/Somerset was running them into the ground. But Corcoran eventually surrendered; and the state turned over the extra resources directly to Jefferson and its officials. It stopped requiring an “external operator.”

This was crucial.

The scandal essentially liberated Jefferson from the state’s malicious means of sabotage, while letting it keep most of the resources committed to the charter company. It wasn’t required to waste money on MGT or anyone else. The scandal essentially created a new kind of district in Florida — better funded and free of state sabotage.

The results — even on Florida’s corrupt school grade scoreboard — speak for themselves. They show what can happen when you get rid of some of the bullshit that people who hate public education inflict on public schools — and replace them with actual resources dedicated to helping children.

The Mockingjay

All in all, it’s been a revolutionary few weeks in Florida education — whether people perceive it yet or not.

The Florida counteroffensive victories of late 2023 are likely to have much greater long-term impact than a bunch of deviants who drew attention to themselves for a few months trying to ban some books and lie about history.

And Jefferson was the Mockingjay.

I hope people will remember that. Everyone who cares about humane, honest, developmental public education owes them our thanks.