Laptop South Florida

Laptop South Florida (LSF) is the name of the organization we are forming to bring OLPC laptop computers and our own unique* teacher-training to the children of Immokalee this summer. The pilot is going strong, under the guidance of Naples Social Action - especially of Jane, who is lead teacher and acting executive director of LSF.

I suppose if Jane is acting executive director, that makes me acting chairman of the board - even though we haven't officially named a board yet, I have gathered 11 folks to be on it.

In filing for our 501(c)(3) status with the IRS, I had to produce a budget. I sat down and came up with a $2.9 million plan, mostly for teacher-trainer pay and to cover the cost of laptops. There is minimal administrative and overhead built into it, mostly in the form of fundraising and marketing: it takes money to make money, even (or especially?) in the citizen sector.

$2.9 million may seem like a lot of money, but our plan is to give computers and training to tens of thousands of kids in South Florida over the next few years. If you look at the money this community generates for charity each year, it's a drop in the bucket. The Philharmonic Center for the Arts ("The Phil"), for instance, is said to have a $90 million endowment. Art is important for a community, absolutely. But not nearly as vital as education. These children we're working with are the artists, museum curators, and wealthy philanthropists of the future. They'll be our doctors, lawyers, inventors, political and business leaders.

Or we can leave them as they are, and half of these wonderful, brilliant, inspired children won't graduate from high school. Some will join gangs and deal drugs. Others will get pregnant at 16. Two or three million dollars isn't such a huge amount when viewed from that perspective, is it? We should actually set our sights much higher - but this will do for a start.


*I have resigned from the board of the Waveplace Foundation, for reasons of my own. True, Waveplace taught our teachers how to use software called Squeek eToys, which we are using in the Immokalee pilot. We are grateful for their help, and they have been paid for providing it.

I call our training unique, though, because it became apparent early on that Waveplace training, while adequate for the teachers, was not geared toward 8- and 9-year-olds. Our teachers had to completely recreate the training course for these children. What they have done in this summer program uses eToys, yes. But it is dramatically different from - and far improved over - the course that Waveplace created.

Squeek and eToys are both open-source, Linux-based, software programs. Waveplace did not invent them, and because they're open source, everyone in the world "owns" them. It's one of those commie Internet things that I don't fully understand, but that I do enjoy.

Property Tax Break vs. High Property Values. You can't have both.

Scenario: You sell real estate, you own real estate you'd like to sell, you're a developer who'd like to sell homes, or you run the local Chamber of Commerce and want to help the local economy, which has been in a deep slump lately.

Question: Should you support Florida Constitutional Amendment 5, which will eliminate the state property tax (which is devoted to public education), or should you oppose it and try to keep the tax?

Answer: If you are short-sighted and look at property values from a very narrow perspective, vote for the constitutional change. This logic holds that people will be more likely to buy homes in Florida if there is no property tax. More buyers, of course, equals a tighter market, which equals higher prices.

If you understand economics in general and property values in particular, vote against Amendment 5 and keep the property tax. Why? Because the #1 influence on the value of a home is the quality of the local public schools.

Better schools = higher property values. That's more money in your pocket, plain and simple.

Amendment 5 claims to "replace" the tax revenue generated by property taxes with revenue from elsewhere - probably a 1% increase on the state sales tax. Experts report that the result would actually be a $9 billion shortfall. This isn't merely changing where the money comes from. It's going to bring in less money, and our schools - and home values - will suffer accordingly.

Why should affluent senior citizens care? Poor schools = low-wage jobs = high crime.

I have gotten active in the all-important drive to bring high-wage jobs to Southwest Florida. I'm senior partner in a new venture fund (http://www.niavg.com/) which is dedicated to exactly that, so my money is literally right where my mouth is. Why? Because higher-wage jobs will transform our economy, thus taking pressure off of the social-service nonprofits Naples Social Action works so hard to help. We'll have fewer "working poor," a term I find obscene - if you work an honest week, you shouldn't be poor come Friday!

The thing is, the first question a high-wage employer asks before opening up shop in an area is, "How well-educated is the workforce?" The first question a potential high-wage/high-skill employee asks before relocating to an area is, "Will my children get the kind of education that a parent like me demands?" If the answer to either of these is No, then guess who ain't moving to Southwest Florida? And guess what that means for our property values?

"Common sense is the rarest of commodities," as a sage once said. So too with understanding of economics. Please, don't get bamboozled by people who themselves aren't very bright. If someone tries selling you on Amendment 5, remember the swampland scams that Florida used to be famous for, and back away - quickly.

Your wealth depends on it.

School Vouchers: Here we go again!

Following are excerpts from a June, 2005 article on the previous effort to destroy the Florida public school system and the US Constitutional decree for the separation of church and state. The good guys won that round because of the Florida constitution.

The result? Jeb Bush and his right-wing zealot cronies are now attempting to re-write the Florida constitution, apparently believing that if you don't like losing the game, change the rules. Even worse, they are using misleading language in two ballot initiatives (7 & 9) to do it - so even if one ammendment fails, the other may make it past duped voters.

From June, 2005:

...in a case that will determine whether the state can continue diverting much-needed tax dollars from neighborhood public schools to private, mostly church-run schools.

In November 2004, the First District Court of Appeal ruled that the Florida Opportunity Scholarship Program represented a scheme by which government funds were used to support religious institutions, in violation of Florida's 137-year-old Constitutional prohibition specifically barring aid to religious institutions. The appeals court upheld two earlier decisions striking down vouchers that were issued by a three-judge panel of the same court and by the Leon County Circuit Court.

"What is at stake in this case is one of the very essential founding principles of our government - that no one should be forced through the tax system to finance religious institutions whose beliefs they may not share," said attorney Ron Meyer, who is serving as co-counsel in the lawsuit. "Of course, it is profoundly important that parents have the right to send their children, at their own expense, to schools of their choice, including schools that share their religious values. However, taxpayers should not be forced to finance religious institutions with which they do not agree."

For the whole story: http://www.aclu.org/religion/govtfunding/16266prs20050606.html

Midnight Basketball

As I've mentioned on my previous blog, I'm friends with a diverse number of individuals, some of whom are way to the left of me, others even farther to the right (to be fair, I'm not as centrist as I used to be). A number of us, the leadership group of CFI Naples, carry on a wide-ranging email conversation at all times - there are roughly a score of us, six or seven of whom weigh in regularly on whatever the topic of the hour happens to be.

The most recent exchange related to "cradle-to-grave" socialism versus corporate welfare. One member of our group said that when the government helps a company, the stockholders (you and me, if we choose) benefit. He then went on to say, "How do you invest in Midnight Basketball?" What follows is my reply:

The way we invest in Midnight Basketball is by paying taxes or, as I'd much prefer, giving money to charity.* Our return on investment is when the kids involved don't carjack us; instead, some of them will go to college and one of the companies you mentioned will hire them to invent a breakthrough product that will make our lives better and bring the stockholders a nice fat profit.

*What I'm trying to have a little, tiny influence over through my nonprofit efforts is to increase the total dollar amount that individuals and corporations donate. With sufficient funds from the private sector, there would be no need for the government to provide most social services. Not only can the citizen ("nonprofit") sector often operate more efficiently than the government, but by choosing where we'd like our money to go, we are applying the strength of the market to said programs. If people want to invest in midnight basketball or food stamps, they can. If they'd rather invest in Junior Achievement and cancer research, then they can do that instead.

Kennedy in Defense of "Liberal"

Funny, I've never thought of myself as a liberal, and I've never been a big fan of JFK's. But today a friend shared this quote, which somehow I'd never read before. Enjoy!

"If by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'Liberal,' then I'm proud to say I'm a 'Liberal.' - John F. Kennedy

Florida Schools Improve Dramatically!

When I began paying attention to the rankings of Florida schools a few years ago, we were at a disgraceful 48 out of 50 - third from the worst.

When I checked again, I believe 2 years ago, we were at 35. Incredible improvement, yet still abysmal.

Now we're 14, improved from 31 just last year! At this rate, we'll be able to be proud of our public schools in just another year or two. To be fair, though, I am proud of the state's strides already. That's an amazing clean-up job in a short period of time.

If every state in the union competed to be in the top 3 every year, I think we'd have nothing to complain about in our schools in a very short time. Just getting educators, voters, and legislators to set top-ranking as a goal... that is the challenge.

If someone can be the best, why not you? And when it comes to educating our children, what is more important?

The News-Press (Fort Myers, FL) ... June 16, 2008
Guest Opinion: Eric J. Smith: Student achievement rises in Florida
By Eric J. Smith

With the help of Florida's hard-working teachers, a decade ago we began building the nation's leading accountability system. Improving student achievement was difficult, because no indicator of student performance existed. However, the results are clear. Florida has improved 17 places to 14th in the nation, according to Education Week's Quality Counts report. Florida's ability to improve student achievement each year rests on the... [click for full story] http://iw.newsbank.com/iw-search/we/InfoWeb?p_action=doc&p_theme=aggdocs&p_topdoc=1&p_docnum=1&p_sort=YMD_date:D&p_product=LNNB&p_docid=121695451B2BD750&p_text_direct-0=document_id=(%20121695451B2BD750%20)&p_multi=FMNB&p_nbid=O55H4CVEMTIxNjIyOTgzNC40MjEzNDoxOjU6andlc3Q

Magical thinking on education, vouchers

By Diane Roberts
St. Petersburg Times Sunday, June 15, 2008

This week's summit — as sponsors call it — of Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education might seem like a mere "school choice" pep rally with a bonus excursion to the Magic Kingdom, but it's happening at a time when the Legislature has decimated school funding. Moreover, this is an election year.

Headliners at the conference at the Disney World Contemporary Resort include New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, US Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, a slew of usual suspects from the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, plus Barbara Bush and state Senator Dan Webster, whose valedictory piece of legislation was a resolution instructing Floridians to pray away hurricanes on June 1.

And, of course, Jeb Bush himself.

Three of the nine amendments Floridians will vote on this November will determine the course of public education in this state. Amendment 5 gets rid of local property taxes designated for schools, requiring the Legislature to raise sales taxes or perform some other voodoo economics to make up the funding gap. Amendments 7 and 9 would demolish Florida's separation of church and state and repeal the part of the Constitution that calls for a "uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education." The state would simply be obligated to provide education "fulfilled at a minimum and not exclusively" by public schools.

Out of office ain't out of power — Amendments 7 and 9 come courtesy of Jeb Bush and his band of true believers.

Some history: While he was governor, Jeb Bush drove an ideological tank through Florida's schoolyards, taking command of education from pre-K to postgrad, imposing the FCAT, penalizing "failing" schools, declaring war on the teachers' unions and forcing vouchers upon the state.

But Florida courts deemed his "Opportunity Scholarships" unconstitutional on the grounds that they violate the separation of church and state, channeling taxpayer money to religious schools and because they undermined the requirement to have a uniform public education system. When he left office in 2007, it looked like Jeb Bush had lost.

But if at first you don't succeed, start your own right wing think tank. Raise money. Work with allies in Florida's Republican oligarchy to stack the relevant boards and commissions with your supporters. If vouchers are unconstitutional, then change the Constitution.

Instead of working through the elected Legislature, voucher proponents turned to the unelected Taxation and Budget Reform Commission. The commission, a 25-member panel made up of gubernatorial and legislative appointees, appears only every 20 years. It is charged with examining the state's budget structure and coming up with new ways to find the money to address the state's needs.

Installed on this year's commission were a few token Democrats, such as former Senator Les Miller and former FSU president and American Bar Association president Sandy D'Alemberte, but mostly trusty conservatives like former House Speaker Allan Bense and Bush administration retreads Brian Yablonski and Greg Turbeville, among others. The commission's chief Bush cheerleader was, however, Patricia Levesque, Jeb's former deputy chief of staff and executive director of his foundation.

Levesque is hostile to public education. She's a graduate of Bob Jones, the Talibanesque South Carolina college where mingling between the genders is policed, dancing is verboten and interracial dating was banned until 2000. But like her boss and his allies, Levesque couches her educational radicalism in the kinder, gentler, more politic language of "reform," "options" and "competition." She and other voucher advocates are smart enough to game the system. Amendment 9, the one that guts the constitutional imperative to provide a "high quality" education in favor of minimal funding for schools, also orders that 65 percent of school funding go toward "classroom instruction."

Mark Pudlow, spokesman for the Florida Education Association, points out that most schools already spend 65 percent or more of their budgets on instruction, and the amendment language is just a "Trojan horse" to sneak vouchers inside our education system. "They had to obfuscate the purposes of both Amendments 7 and 9. Most people don't want vouchers."

Indeed, a recent Quinnipiac University poll shows that only 38 percent would approve a vouchers-only amendment. But if you throw in the spurious "65 percent solution," 63 percent of voters would say yes. Bushites on the commission are shocked! shocked! at accusations of sneaky tactics. Greg Turbeville, who proposed Amendment 9, says that since it deals with both spending and policy, "It made perfect sense to combine the two."

Now, you may be wondering why a commission charged by the Constitution to periodically examine "the tax structure," assess revenue sources and figure out the state's fiscal needs, is fooling around with education policy. Levesque and Turbeville argue that since education is a huge part of the Florida budget, education is fair game for the commission. "School spending is well within the realm of the budget commission," says Turbeville.

Dexter Douglass, the well-known Tallahassee lawyer, constitutional expert, and former general counsel to Democratic Governor Lawton Chiles, begs to differ: "They don't have authority to do what they did." The Florida Education Association concurs. It has filed a lawsuit contending that the commission overreached in its attempts to do an end run around both the courts and the legislative process.

But however the legal challenge shakes out, however the vote goes in November, the problem remains what to do with Florida's increasingly stressed, grievously impoverished schools. Jeb Bush argues that parents should be able to remove their children from bad schools and use state money to send them to private or parochial institutions. In a May 6 opinion piece for the Times, the former governor claimed that with vouchers "all schools got better."

This is magical (perhaps "ideological" is a better word) thinking. Taking money away from one of the worst-funded school systems in the nation to feed private schools — schools which do not have to test their students, administer the FCAT, or meet minimum standards, schools which are not accountable to the taxpayers whose money they spend — is hardly a prescription for improvement. We've had a strong separation of church and state since 1838; dissolving that opens up not so much a can of worms as the whole worm farm.

The Bushite argument goes, don't worry, the Legislature will continue to fund public schools — sort of. These are the same people who said they'd "hold education harmless" this year, then turned around and cut $891-million. Dexter Douglass isn't buying it: "Jeb Bush set out to destroy public education in Florida." Given his determination to shift public money to private institutions, it sure begins to look like that.

Diane Roberts, a former member of the Times editorial board, is professor of English at Florida State University.

"Three Cups of Tea"

I had the pleasure to meet Greg Mortenson here in Naples last winter when he appeared for a WGCU interview and books signing at Mina Hemingway's* bookstore (which, let me add, I highly recommend.)

I met Greg and then I read his best-seller, "Three Cups of Tea," about his adventures building schools in the most remote Pakistani and Afghan villages.

I'm thunderstruck by this humble man's world-shaking accomplishments. So much so that I proudly nominated him for an Ashoka Fellowship just last week (http://www.ashoka.org/). "Dr. Greg," as he is often called in the Himalayas, is on track for a Nobel Peace Prize. You read it here first.

To learn more, read this Op-Ed Column in The New York Times by Nicholas Kristof:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/opinion/13kristof.html?_r=2&th&emc=th&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Excerpted from the NYT piece:

"So a lone Montanan staying at the cheapest guest houses has done more to advance U.S. interests in the region than the entire military and foreign policy apparatus of the Bush administration."

Militarily, I'm no dove. But this article - and the book itself - makes you think. It seems Mortenson has found a more effective way of keeping us safe from terrorism.



*Yes, that's Earnest's granddaughter. Welcome to Naples.

Social Entrepreneurs

The line between for-profits and non-profits is disintegrating.

Investments in people [from The Financial Times]
By Sarah Murray
Published: June 7 2008 02:19

The next few years could see a shift in emphasis in the non-profit world – at least, if the work of organisations supporting entrepreneurs is an indication of the direction the sector is taking. “Philanthropy is one of those wonderfully antique words that we will stop using in 10 to 15 years,” says Bill Drayton, who founded Ashoka and pioneered the idea of identifying and investing in entrepreneurs. “The business/social boundaries are simply collapsing.”

As models such as venture philanthropy, microfinance and social entrepreneurship are embraced by non-profit organisations, and corporations start to focus on social issues, the barriers between the business and non-profit sectors continue to erode.

Click here to read the rest of the article:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/771993f0-3423-11dd-869b-0000779fd2ac,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F771993f0-3423-11dd-869b-0000779fd2ac.html%3Fnclick_check%3D1&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fashoka.org%2F&nclick_check=1

Laptops in News

Here are three local stories on our efforts in Immokalee:

July 4 - http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080704/NEWS01/807040402/1075&referrer=FRONTPAGECAROUSEL

June 29 - http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2008/jun/29/program-educates-children-through-computers/

May 2 - http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2008/may/02/immokalee-children-get-free-laptops-education/

Laptop news

Here's part of a story from www.eSchoolNews.com:

Just last month, fourth-graders at the Redlands Christian Migrant Association Community School in Immokalee, Fla., received XO computers from the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. It was part of a 10-week pilot program that began June 1.

Redlands joins South Carolina's Marion County School District and the Birmingham, Ala., school system in deploying low-cost ($200) XO laptops to students in the United States. Just this week, the Birmingham school board voted to accept the remaining 14,000 pre-purchased XO laptops from the city to give to elementary students after a pilot project with the first 1,000 laptops proved encouraging.

And in the latest example of the mini-laptop trend, FUSD [Fresno, CA] is deploying nearly 10,000 Mini-Note PCs from Hewlett-Packard Co. to students in grades two through 12 this fall.

"The teacher feedback from the pilot [at FUSD] was a lot more positive than we expected, considering the technical challenges of putting 1,000 small wireless laptops in 57 different classrooms," says Madden. "The creative ways our teachers and students took advantage of the computers at every grade level in every subject was absolutely amazing. At the end of the pilot, our teachers wouldn't give up the laptops when we collected them for refurbishment, unless they were assured that they would be returned in the fall."

For the story in its entirety: http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/?i=54502;_hbguid=d13a6db2-c165-415a-9bac-d9d16864407f

It looks to me like there are some school systems that are much further along than we are here in Collier County. I guess we have our work cut out for us to catch up!

Food for Thought

"The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves." - Plato