Class size and the summer of our discontent

This, paraphrasing Shakespeare, is our summer of discontent. The oil-slicked Gulf resembles a driveway beneath a '66 Corvair. Economic doldrums persist amid talk of a double-dip recession. Every day seems to bring new reports of al-Qaida terrorists or Russian spies plotting against us.

Close to home, first-responders are under fire, and city hall flags fly at half-staff. Movie houses groan with high-budget stinkers. And a richly anticipated college football season is still more than a month off.

It is a bad season, in short, for elected officials to come seeking our understanding, let alone our sympathy. They will find none among a restless and sweaty population unable to write itself a raise while revisiting the austere virtues of the staycation. Our checkbooks are bare, our credit cards maxed and our patience shot.

This is the backdrop against which the Pasco County school district is, even now, attempting to balance a brutally off-kilter budget, a feat complicated by the competing sensibilities of union members and a prickly electorate and exacerbated by state constitutional mandate.

If there's any good news in this, it's that - assuming everyone involved acts with transparency and in good faith - teachers and voters can be counted on to succumb to reason. Alas, the same cannot be said for Florida's constitution, which, owing to prevailing pop psychology and deft political angling, has since 2000 directed school districts to shrink, shrink, shrink classroom populations.

The result has been 10 great years for the school construction industry and its subset, portable classroom builders, and for the outsize expansion of teachers union membership. Given three - now four - decades of conflicting data between class size and student performance, the latter was pretty much the ambition driving the amendment's boosters anyway.

Pasco schools Superintendent Heather Fiorentino, then a classroom teacher and a state representative, remembers counseling her colleagues against supporting the referendum. "Bricks and mortar," she would say. "That's where your raises will be going."

Unfortunately, they don't give awards for prescience.

Paying the piper

These days, Pasco abounds with shiny new schools and renovated and expanded old schools. Although much of the construction was driven by years of population growth, it is undeniable that the proportions of the projects were driven by the dictates of Florida's class size amendment, a blunt instrument poorly suited to the delicate, ostensible task of improving student learning.

Indeed, results from the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate the state's decadelong surge in both overall student performance and gap-closing achievements by Hispanic and black children owes more to Jeb Bush-era reforms establishing academic standards, aggressive testing, strict accountability and school choice options than reduced class populations.

Meanwhile, seeking the bottom of a cratered economy, Pasco teachers and staff face yet another year without raises; an unknown number of furlough days; and unprecedented out-of-pocket contributions to benefits packages, to name only a few of the most prominent proposals for patching the district's $28 million pothole.

Taxpayers beleaguered

Skeptics will note, correctly, that capital and operational expenses come from different budgets. However, the ultimate source of the revenues for both is the same beleaguered taxpayer noted above - the gal and/or guy who is more than familiar with frozen paychecks, unpaid leave and rising benefits costs. Meanwhile, his 401(k) account is crippled and her house is worth 40 percent less than its purchase price.

There is only so much more those folks can endure. Nonetheless, the school board - with a quarter-point millage rate increase on the table - seems prepared to ask.

We wouldn't mind so much, even this particular summer when we're feeling especially squeezed and cranky, because we appreciate the greater good of a competently educated citizenry. What hurts is grasping, at last, not only that we were pretty much bamboozled on the class size amendment, but we have to pay extra for the honor.

Talk about buyer's remorse.