This is not about rewarding teachers whose students get high test scores but who themselves got high scores on these exams — even if it was decades ago. Teachers who never took those tests — by, for example, starting out in community colleges — don’t qualify.

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Also last year, the legislature set up a multi-million dollar fund to dispense cash to school districts that agreed to adopt policies requiring K-8 students to wear school uniforms. According to the Orlando Sentinel, only eight of the nearly 75 districts took the bait — but legislators have decided to extend the program, voting to spend $14 million to extend the program a second year. Districts that agree to uniform policies win $10 for every student enrolled.

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In the largest district in the state, Miami-Dade, schools already required uniforms but there was no system-wide policy, so officials set one in order to qualify for the cash, according to the Miami Herald.

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What’s wrong with that? Not only is there no serious broad evidence that wearing uniforms improves student achievement, but as Capitol News Service reported, some people say there are no controls on how districts can spend the money. The news service quoted Senate Democratic Leader Arthenia Joyner as saying:

“This gives money to school districts without any instructions. and parents don’t have the right to the funds.”

That means that a school district could require students to wear uniforms, get a pile of money from the state for implementing the policy, and then not use any of the cash to help low-income parents actually buy the uniform.

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The news service also said Sen. Jeff Clemons (D) of Palm Beach expressed concern that charter schools will now be available to win some of the money. He was quoted as saying:

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“We have a lot of educational needs in the state of Florida. Fourteen million dollar could be used for something, in my estimation, more important than school uniforms.”

Proponents of uniforms say that they change the way students approach learning, making them concentrate more on academics than on social issues, and that socioeconomic differences among students are less visible when kids are wearing the same thing. Opponents say that there is no serious research showing that uniforms improve student learning and that kids’ rights are violated by denying them the right to dress in the manner they choose.

The research available on the topic is minimal — and what there is hardly conclusive. You can get a taste for this by looking at one 2011 working research paper, titled “Dressed for Success: The Effect of School Uniforms on Student Achievement and Behavior.” Published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, it says in the abstract:

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By including student and school fixed-effects we find evidence that uniform adoption improves attendance in secondary grades, while in elementary schools they generate large increases in teacher retention.

If you read further, the paper says:

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Concerns about school safety and the desire by administrators to try different strategies to improve test scores and behavior has led many schools to adopt student uniforms. However, the current evidence on uniforms is sparse and the existing research relies on cross-sectional variation. Since schools likely adopt uniforms in response to poor behavior or achievement the results from this research may suffer from substantial bias.

The researchers wrote that while other uniform research studies are likely affected by bias, they have managed to avoid the same problem. They wrote: “While we cannot fully rule out that our estimates pick up the effects of other policies that are adopted contemporaneously with uniforms, we nonetheless provide some analyses that assess the extent to which changes in policy may be affecting our estimates.” Still, it is not clear that these researchers have removed every other possible factor for the changes they found.

In any case, Florida is wasting millions on a program that has shown no real benefit to students. Again.