TALAHASSEE, Fla. – What’s happened to Florida Gov. Rick Scott?

When Scott took office earlier this year, he wasted no time establishing himself as a bold education reformer by placing limits on teacher tenure, basing teacher pay on student achievement, and increasing the number of charter schools.

Scott deserves credit for getting those reforms across the finish line, but he seems to have lost his nerve for bold action in the current fight over school funding.

Instead of explaining to taxpayers how Florida’s public school budgets are being overrun by special interest labor unions, Scott is sounding like a spokesman for the Florida Education Association, telling lawmakers he will “not sign a budget … that does not significantly increase state funding for education.”

Scott says he wants to “invest” – a favorite union buzzword – a billion more dollars into public education, and would pay for it by cutting $2 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to hospitals.

State Democrats wasted little time in framing Scott’s proposal as “school books versus seniors.” That’s a pretty harsh but nonetheless accurate analysis.

Scott is buying into (and selling) the faulty premise that Florida’s public schools are being underfunded by taxpayers. Instead, the governor’s focus should be on how school employee unions divert millions of dollars away from classrooms and into expensive, goodie-filled labor contracts that benefit adult employees at the expense of students.

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While their leaders openly bemoan pending budget cuts due to an expected decline in state aid, Milwaukee Public Schools’ is spending $24,999 to private investigators to obtain evidence and provide surveillance of their teachers to determine residency.

That expenditure was one of the more interesting found during MacIver News Service’s routine examination of the MPS checkbook.

Others include:

$1,360 for coat rack rentals

$24,999 for MPS enrollment advertising

$16,000 for the Flood the Hood with Dreams mentoring program

$560 for after school yoga instruction

$4,600 for a Drumline coach

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A few weeks back, I was preparing for a talk about school choice in Indiana.

Since I was going to talk about how big a burden K-12 education is for state and local governments, I thought I should try to get the most recent total spending figure. I say “try” because I know getting a good, recent, comprehensive total K-12 spending figure is not easy. Indiana is no special case in this regard; it’s a problem across the country.

But I was surprised by how officials at the Indiana Department of Education reacted to my simple request . . . usually government education officials aren’t so obvious about their obfuscation. They referred by request to their legal department. I was asked to explain who I was, what organization I was with, and how I would use the information before they would approve the release of what should be very public information.

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