How Bad Is Rick Scott's Florida?

I know that lots of my fellow Wisconsinites think we’ve got it bad with Gov. Scott Walker, but he’s arguably only the 4th or 5th worst governor in America. Topping the list of awfulness has to be Florida’s Rick Scott, who, prior to aspiring to elective office, was CEO of a major medical company when it was hit with the largest civil fine in US history for Medicare fraud. Unlike Richard Nixon, he provably was a crook.

Florida is, you will recall, the state that provided angry white men with a legal excuse to gun down young black men with its “stand your ground” law and which has fired state environmental-agency employees for daring to utter the words “climate change” in public.

And now it’s on the high-stakes-testing bandwagon promoted by publishers of high-stakes tests (duh); proprietors of for-profit “academies" who dearly love to paint the public schools as “failures” using whatever tenuous, filmy evidence they can dredge up; and minimal-government types who just don’t want to see any public good being provided via taxpayer money.

Guess who’s already figured out that this latest “reform" is a massive scam. No, not necessarily any of Florida’s elected officials. Turns out to be one of our hopes for America’s future, 4th-grader Sydney Smoot.

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You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.

— George W. Bush (1946- ), 43rd US president, explaining his education policies, 2001 February