GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Gage Skidmore)

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich today announced campaign chairs and co-chairs for all of Florida’s 67 counties.

The Miami Herald reports that GOP state Reps. Michael Bileca and Carlos Trujillo will chair and co-chair (respectively) Gingrich’s campaign committee in Miami-Dade County, and Rep. Debbie Mayfield will chair the Indian River County committee.

Gingrich hired Jose Mallea, former campaign chief for U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, as his Florida campaign director last week.

The Herald cites a Newt 2012 press release issued today that includes other Republicans close to Rubio: Monica Rodriguez, a former aide to Rubio in the Florida House; Karin Hoffman; Sam Rashid, chairman of the Rubio for Senate campaign in Hillsborough County; Dr. Miguel Fana, finance chair for Rubio for Senate; and Tony DiMatteo, the county chair for Rubio in Pinellas County.

The Herald adds that more than 20 “Gingrich backers were on Herman Cain’s team until his campaign fell apart.”

The release adds: “‘Campaigns are won on the ground and through the hard work of grassroots activists such as those who have joined Newt Gingrich’s team in Florida,’ said Deborah Cox Roush, Florida State Director of County Chairs.”

The list of Gingrich supporters in Florida brings together GOP members who in the past have supported among others John McCain and Sarah Palin, former President George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, Charlie Crist, Bill McCollum, Gov. Rick Scott, Rep. Allen West and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Gage Skidmore)

GOP 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has hired people close to Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., to head his campaign in Florida.

The Miami Herald reports:

Some of the biggest and deep-pocketed Republican heavy-hitters opened their wallets Monday for Sen. Marco Rubio’s Reclaim America PAC, which pulled in an easy $200,000.

Organizing the event: Rubio fundraiser Esther Nuhfer, whom we just learned is going to be Gingrich’s finance director.

Nuhfer is a political consultant who also has ties to Rep. David Rivera, R-Miami, whom the Federal Election Commission asked to explain personal and campaign finance accounts in August. The St. Petersbrug Times reported in February that “criminal investigators in Miami and Tallahassee comb[ed] through [Rivera's] personal finances and campaign accounts — including the Senate account that fattened Nuhfer’s paycheck. Investigators are focusing on Rivera’s tight relationship with Nuhfer.”

The Herald also reported Monday that “Republican presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich has hired” Jose Mallea, “U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio’s former campaign chief [to] be his Florida director.”

According to the Herald, Mallea “has ties to former Gov. Jeb Bush’s political machine as well as Miami City Hall” and “brings Gingrich’s campaign a wealth of connections to Florida Republicans and Miami-Dade’s Hispanic community. Mallea is also a co-owner of Local Craft Food & Drink in Coral Gables.”

The conservative political blog Shark Tank writes that Mallea’s “hire may be an indicator of a significant shift of support towards Gingrich, as there is speculation around the state that a good portion of former Rubio staffers and operatives- including many others from current and ‘suspended’ presidential campaigns are lining up to get on board Gingrich’s campaign.”

According to the Herald, Rubio said that as House speaker, Gingrich “was pretty consistently in favor of the positions of the Cuban exile community.”

Education reform in K through 12 public schools includes efforts to increase graduation rates, college readiness and accountability, and to conduct efficient testing and student evaluation and review teacher effectiveness.

The NEA report (PDF) highlights three areas where the union believes “steps can and should be taken to transform the teaching profession”: raising the bar to entry, ensuring “that those who are in the classroom maintain a high standard of practice” and providing “union leadership to transform the profession.”

Education Week reported Thursday that NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said the “NEA will support national standards for teacher preparation and licensing. All teacher candidates should have one full year of teaching residency, and pass a performance-based assessment before entering the classroom.”

“The NEA has supported teacher residency programs in the past, but has not specifically called for all teacher education programs to embrace them,” Education Week added.

The majority of K through 12 education reform efforts over the last decade have included plans to strengthen charter schools, expand the use of public funds for virtual/private schools and broaden the use of technology in the classroom. Florida has led the way through organizations like Foundation for Excellence in Education and Foundation for Florida’s Future, founded and co-chaired by former Gov. Jeb Bush.

Gov. Rick Scott said at a gathering for conservative politicians and organizations in August that his administration has done four things in education: eliminate more teacher tenure; pay teachers based on standardized test results; support and increase charter schools (which Scott defined as public schools run by a third party); and offer scholarships.

Sheldon Berman — superintendent of the Eugene, Ore., school district — and Arthur Camins —director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education — wrote in November that “the way to turn schools around and transform the education of at-risk students is to invest in the professional ability of the faculty, making its members a mission-driven, skilled force for change.”

They added: “Working from this premise, the Jefferson County, Ky., public school system, which includes the city of Louisville, designed and implemented” the Investment Model, that “invests in the creation of a professionalized teaching culture and represents a conceptual shift in what teaching and learning are all about.”

Berman and Camins wrote that this model works as an alternative to U.S. Department of Education’s four turnaround models that include replacing the principal, rehiring no more than 50 percent of the staff and reopening a school as a charter school (i.e., one that is publicly funded but privately managed).

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich (Photo Wikimedia Commons/Gage Skidmore)

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s recent call for a humane path to immigration enforcement makes him the most recent conservative voice calling for solutions that encompass something more than the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.

Color Lines, a daily news site “in service to racial justice,” writes today that Gingrich’s”remarks were a reminder of how far the right has moved on immigration, and how twisted the immigration debate has become for both parties. It’s too soon to say, but Gingrich’s remarks could be a sign that Republicans are ready to heed growing calls from within their own party to temper the anti-immigrant rhetoric and stop alienating Latino voters.”

At last week’s CNN GOP presidential debate focused on national security, Gingrich said, “I don’t see how the — the party that says it’s the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families that have been here a quarter century. And I’m prepared to take the heat for saying, ‘Let’s be humane in enforcing the law without giving them citizenship, but by finding a way to create legality so that they are not separated from their families.’”

The Washington Post reports that “Gingrich attracted huge crowds in Florida this weekend, but he continued to face down accusations from his rivals that he is too soft on immigration to win the Republican presidential nomination.”

The Post adds that Gingrich, “who joined former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney at the top of the field less than two weeks ago, showed no sign of slipping at two appearances along the southwest Florida coast — a conservative enclave and critical battleground in the state’s Jan. 31 primary.”

Gingrich has laid out a 10-step program for immigration reform — without citizenship for undocumented immigrants — that would create “a truly efficient and fair system that embraces the rule of law, while acknowledging and celebrating the valuable economic, cultural and social contributions that both existing and future visitors and immigrants have to offer our country.”

The Hispanic Leadership Network, “a sustained effort to engage the Hispanic Community on center-right issues,” co-chaired by former Gov. Jeb Bush and launched this year, is working on several issues, including immigration, to “find common sense solutions to address our broken immigration system.” The Leadership Network will host its national conference in Miami in January 2012.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has said legal and illegal immigration remains a problem that needs to be confronted, and “that Republicans would do better to tone down the overheated rhetoric and focus on a positive immigration reform agenda.”

Rubio has also said that the Republican Party “should be the pro-legal immigration party,” saying it’s time for GOP candidates to start talking about “how we modernize our legal immigration system.”

In September, HLN kicked off its efforts in the Southwest by holding a conference in Albuquerque having as keynote speaker Gov. Susana Martinez, one of a group of high-profile Hispanic Republican leaders elected in November 2010 that also includes Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval and U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (Fla.), urged those in attendance to “have a conversation” with Latinos in their communities.

National HLN co-chairs, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Bush administration Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, were unable to attend but sent videos. Both praised Martinez’s leadership and argued that Democrats had failed Latinos.

Stringent immigration policies enacted by Republican-controlled state governments, as well as rhetoric on the issue that many perceive to be anti-Hispanic, have alienated many Hispanic voters from the GOP.

Lauro Garza, the head of Somos Republicans, a Hispanic GOP group in Texas, recently announced he was leaving the party after presidential candidate Herman Cain said he wanted an electric fence on the border that would kill potential unauthorized migrants, which Garza pointed to as evidence that the party had been “infiltrated by nativist ideas.”

The founders of HLN are hoping that it can reverse the trend of Southwestern Hispanic voters rejecting the GOP. But according to Jose Armas of the Hispanic Link News Service, the HLN conference received a mixed to negative reaction from Latinos in attendance. One particular grievance was that the Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison company which lobbied in favor of Arizona’s restrictive immigration law S.B. 1070, was a sponsor of the conference.

Here’s video of Gutierrez and Bush addressing the conference:

Most recently, Skandera’s department has been taking a beating in radio ads sponsored by Michael Corwin and his Independent Source PAC, in which the liberal political action committee took her, the governor and the state’s public education administrators to task for alleged conflicts of interest.

Skandera, though, seems to brush aside such indiscretions, nor does the fact that she’s still unconfirmed worry her either, having told the New Mexican in an interview yesterday, “I don’t care.”

Instead, she’s lobbying for the new A-F grading system, which lawmakers passed in last February’s legislative session. Toward that end, she’ll be holding a public meeting in Santa Fe October 31. She’s also hoping to gather more support for her controversial plan to revamp the social promotion bill.

Her plan, which she wants to rename the reading intervention bill, would jettison the practice of sending those third graders who cannot read at a proficient level onto the next grade. It’s an idea Corwin, among others, has argued against, citing sociologist and longtime member of the National Academy of Sciences Robert M. Houser’s congressional testimony that “the research evidence is overwhelming: Simply holding back students who have not achieved to the appropriate standard does not work.”

It’s also an agenda Skandera appears to have brought with her from Florida, where she served as Governor Jeb Bush’s deputy commissioner of education and advocated the eradication of social promotion, among other changes.

In 2007, Bush, along with Zachariah Zachariah and Brian Yablonski (both of whom have been under investigation by the SEC), founded the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a group that helped draft last year’s New Mexico senate bill 427, the so-called “education reform” bill introduced by Senator Vernon Asbill.

In her interview with the New Mexican, Skandera also told reporter Robert Nott of her desire to move New Mexico students into a virtual learning environment, one provided not by that already in place under the state’s Higher Education Department but one contracted out to a private company. Toward that end, Skandera said the state just submitted a grant to the Jaquelin Hume Foundation in order to raise funds for a study on digital-learning resources.

The push for digital learning is another facet of the “Florida model” of education: through his Digital Learning Council, Bush has also emphasized distance learning via the internet as a way to teach children; and distance learning that’s contracted out to private distance-learning companies such as K12, the company that contributed $5,000 to Martinez’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign.

The Hume Foundation was founded by in 1962 by Jaquelin Hume, a major donor to Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial and presidential campaigns. Hume also founded Citizens for America, the conservative grass-roots organization once known as “President Reagan’s Lobby.” The Hume Foundation has connections to many other conservative and fundamentalist foundations, many of which were started up and are funded by ultra-conservatives like Richard Mellon Scaife and Charles and David Koch.

Skandera did not address Corwin’s ads nor any of the other issues raised by them. She did not respond to NMI’s request for comment.

As chairman of the board and president of the Foundation, Bush is working at the national level to support the implementation of choice, competition, school vouchers and testing.

Bush said on Al Punto that laws need be changed in all 50 states to ensure students have access to digital learning, an important issue for the Foundation.

“There are barriers to digital learning, but content must and can be much better than what students currently receive,” Bush said. “There is a lack of good teachers in many places, especially in urban districts. In my opinion, part of the solution is the use of existing technology.”

According to Education Week, a recent U.S. Department of Education analysis based on 2009-10 data from 2,200 school districts shows that teachers in schools where the majority of students are African-American or Latino are “paid significantly less—approximately $2,500 per year.”

The Foundation for Excellence in Education held its National Summit on Education Reform last week; the goal was to offer “an opportunity for lawmakers and policymakers to learn the nuts and bolts of reform.”

Bush was joined on Al Punto by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat who supported his state’s recent approval of the California DREAM Act.

Bush added that in order to make sure more Hispanics and other minorities make it to college, “we need to listen to the mayor,” adding that local reform to include everybody is necessary. Bush said there is a nationwide understanding that children’s expectations must be increased.

Bush said there is a philosophy that says that recent immigrant Hispanics cannot learn, and if “we reduce [children's] expectations we will get those results.”

Villaraigosa said schools must be reformed, “money must be invested where problem exists” and “we must have the most effective teachers.”

State Rep. Erik Fresen and state Sen. Don Gaetz (both Republicans) will speak at the National Summit on Education Reform next week in San Francisco. The summit — organized by the Foundation for Excellence in Education, founded and led by former Gov. Jeb Bush — “offers an opportunity for lawmakers and policymakers to learn the nuts and bolts of reform.”

The Foundation for Excellence works at the national level to support the implementation of choice, competition, school vouchers and testing.

The Miami Herald reported Thursday that Fresen said that during the 2012 legislative session, “he expects to examine how college and university courses match job-market demands. Professor tenure may be part of the discussion.”

This is precisely what Fresen, a Miami Republican, will talk about in San Francisco. The summit’s agenda has Fresen on a five-member panel addressing “an end to tenure and destructive last-in, first-out policies. Salaries that reflect student learning rather than seniority. Learn how lawmakers and policymakers from states around the nation are changing the paradigm of the teaching profession.”

The Herald adds that Fresen thinks maximizing “the ‘profitability’ of the state-funded Florida Virtual School” and allocating “more taxdollars per student to charter schools” should “be on the table.”

Gaetz is one of two scheduled panelists who will speak about “Don’t Let a Financial Crisis Go To Waste,” which will address “the best and worst components of education funding formulas, and just what lawmakers and policymakers can do to get a better return-on-investment for their education dollars.”

Fernando Zulueta, president of Academica Corporation and Fresen’s brother-in-law, will also speak at the summit about expanding capacity of charter schools. According to the Herald, in April a Tallahassee mother of three filed an ethics complaint against state Fresen who voted in the House “for a broad charter schools reform bill.” Fresen called the complaint “another misguided attempt to create smoke where there is no fire.”

The GOP presidential candidates and Florida Republicans disagree on many issues, but they mostly agree that K-12 education policies should be designed at the local level and that the federal government should play a limited role.

According to Education Week:

The Republicans running for president may be working to stand out from the pack on some issues, but it already appears that most of the nine current candidates are largely united when it comes to K-12 policy: They want to dramatically shrink the federal role.

Some candidates, including Reps. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Ron Paul of Texas, are outspoken in saying they want to see the U.S. Department of Education scrapped.

Mitt Romney talks about jobs, health care, fiscal responsibility — issues that Rick Perry lists, adding national security. Michele Bachmann also addresses affordable energy and not increasing the debt ceiling. Newt Gingrich adds protecting life and religious liberty to the list of issues. But all of their campaign websites say nothing on education.

Herman Cain, the recent winner of the Florida straw poll, touts leadership of local municipalities, school choice and expanding school voucers and charter schools, while limiting the “federal government’s control over” education.

Ron Paul limits his campaign website education comments to the importance of home-schooling.

Education Week adds that Perry and Romney “are more nuanced on some education issues but have pumped up their rhetoric around getting the federal government out of schools.” The publication highlights the fact that ”nearly every candidate is largely disparaging” of the No Child Left Behind Act, which “became the centerpiece of GOP President George W. Bush’s domestic legacy.”

According to the Florida Department of Education, No Child Left Behind ”recognizes what truly makes a difference in providing a quality education. It calls for a highly qualified teacher in the core subjects in every classroom; the use of proven, research-based instructional methods; and timely information and options for parents. Schools that underperform are held accountable, providing their students with free tutoring or transfer to a better performing public school.”

Former Gov. Jeb Bush has led education reform based on standardized testing, accountability, teacher merit pay, school choice and charter schools through his Foundation for Excellence in Education and the Foundation for Florida’s Future. Rick Scott, the current Florida governor, has followed in Bush’s footsteps and supported the same type of education reform.

Bush has said, “I think you’re getting more dynamic results by having the states play the policy role and holding local school districts accountable for actual learning,” but he recently appeared along with President Obama to show they have common ground on education reform.

The Sun Sentinel adds that Broward School Board members on Tuesday “directed staffers to research three options, including converting district schools into charters, opening district-run charter schools or acting as a ‘management company.’ Under the third option, the district could be hired to help run charter schools.” The Sun Sentinel explains that “charter schools are privately run, but use tax money and aren’t subject to as many restrictions as regular public schools.”

The Broward school system ”is the sixth largest and the largest fully accredited K-12 and adult school system in the country,” with “nearly 257,000 students, 230 traditional schools and centers, 68 charter schools and one virtual school that serves elementary, middle and high school students.”

Florida Department of Education data (.pdf) shows the state ranked third in the nation in charter school enrollment in 2010-11 with 154,00 students in 459 charter schools in 43 districts.

The Sun Sentinel adds that Broward school district enrollment “has gone down each of the last five years, even though total enrollment in the county is up by 1,931 students,” while the county’s “76 charter schools enrolled 29,489 students this year, up about 6,000 over last year. More than 50 applications for new charters had been submitted as of Aug. 1, according to the district.”

The Fort Lauderdale-based company Charter Schools USA currently operates 24 charter schools in Florida and plans to open 20 more over the next few years.

Jonathan Hage, the current chairman, president and CEO of Charter Schools USA was a member of Gov. Rick Scott’s education transition team and a former director of research for Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Florida’s Future. He recently hosted a summit in Orlando that featured Michelle Rhee, an informal education adviser to Scott and a supporter of the tough-on-teachers brand of school reform.

Robert Runcie, a former businessman with no classroom experience, was recently selected  as Broward’s next school superintendent. He is also an alumnus of The Broad Superintendents Academy, a program of The Broad Center for the Management of School Systems; Rhee serves on the organization’s board of directors.