Dan Lips's blog

If we're going to successfully renew popular support for conservative ideas, the right must capitalize on opportunities to demonstrate how we offer a better vision for America than the left. Florida's success story with education reform is a good example.

Since the 1960s, liberals have backed a failed strategy for improving education -- increasing government spending, growing the federal bureaucracy, and largely resisting serious reform efforts at the state and local level.  Over time, per-pupil spending has doubled and the Washington bureaucracy has ballooned.  But we’ve seen little improvement in student learning.  Millions of kids continue to pass through the nation’s public schools without receiving a quality education.  

Unfortunately, we should expect more of the same from the new administration and congressional majority.  But this will give conservatives a real opportunity to offer parents and taxpayers a more compelling vision for improving education.  A vision based on conservative principles -- limiting Washington’s ineffective role and offering a broad reform agenda at the state and local level.  Growing evidence shows that unlike federal intervention, aggressive-state level reform can deliver real progress.

Thanks to the leadership of former Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida is proving that conservative education reforms work. Over the past decade, the Sunshine State has enacted sweeping reforms, including quality testing and transparency reporting, ending social promotion, improving classroom instruction, and strengthening teaching by offering performance pay incentives. Florida also leads the nation in offering parents the power to choose the best school for their children.  

These reforms have led to dramatic improvement. Since 1998, Florida students have made impressive gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, far outpacing the national average. Importantly, the biggest strides have been made by Hispanic and African-American children. In fact, Florida’s Hispanic students now have higher NAEP reading scores than the statewide average of all students in 15 states (see map below).