I doubt I’ll be going to Tallahassee with the high school students again this year. I can’t see what’s to be gained. Duval Education Advocates and this city’s students have been asking — begging — lawmakers for the same things for the past several years. Without success.

   The main “beg” has to do with putting education funding above other needs, as the Florida Constitution demands. (Florida TaxWatch has identified $4 billion in suggested savings and closed tax loopholes.) My feeling is: Why waste my breath (again)? Why bother talking with party followers, who take their orders from party “leaders,” who in turn take their orders from lobbyists? Why continue to pretend that Florida lawmakers give a flying fig about children who go to public school?

   When I expressed this sentiment to a fellow advocate from the County PTA, however, her response was, “Shhh, not in front of the children.” Most of the children had left by that time, after a morning filled with lessons on how to determine whether their particular concerns were school-based, School Board-based or state-based. Smart kids, this bunch.

   So why not tell the kids the truth? Don’t these high school students deserve to learn how our government really works? Don’t they deserve to know what our generation is preparing to pass off to them, as well as what we’ve allowed to slip away? I can wear my “politically correct” hat with the best of them. I can wax nonpartisan for hours. But sometimes “working within the system” simply isn’t effective — particularly when that system is very, very broken. Sometimes, you’ve got to call it like you see it. This column is dedicated to all the things I’m not supposed to say in front of the kids.

   Lesson One: Jacksonville is purple — indeed, Florida is purple — but the Duval Delegation and the remainder of Florida Legislature are red as a Key West sunburn. You may ask yourself, why, in a city that just elected a Democratic (“blue”) mayor, is our 11-member legislative delegation so lopsided (8 to 3) in favor of (“red”) Republicans? You may ask the same question about the state as a whole, which carried Barack Obama to the White House in 2008; a state that has sent one Democrat and one Republican each to serve in the U.S. Senate; a state that was also squeaky-close to electing Democrat Alex Sink as Governor. How can the state of Florida be so purple, i.e., so mixed, so moderate, and produce such an overwhelmingly right leaning Republican legislature?

   Here’s the answer: The purple and blue outcomes happen on a statewide level; or, in the case of Mayor Alvin Brown’s election, on a citywide level. That is, they happen where there are whole political subdivisions — cities and states — and those places aren’t subject to the careful political gerrymandering that is involved in producing our other political subdivisions.

   Lesson Two: Map-Drawing. Most people’s eyes glaze over when we start talking about the 10-year ritual of redrawing electoral district maps. Resist the eye-glaze, children, this is important. Whether we call it reapportionment or redistricting, it’s detail-oriented, painstaking labor to get all the moving parts to work together. It’s certainly not work for advocacy journalists like me, who look to experts like Republican pollster John Libby to explain the ins and outs. �

   The moving parts, Libby will tell you, are the laws, like Florida’s new Fair Districts Amendment, which incorporates the old, but likely relevant, Voting Rights Act of 1965 (which protects minority-access voting districts). Then there are the problems of equalizing populations, staying within boundaries like interstate highways, rivers and county lines, as well as keeping the districts as compact as possible.

   One moving part says that districts may not be drawn to favor one political party or individual over another. But laws in place to protect minority voter access complicate the picture: While a newly drawn and renumbered Congressional District 3 (formerly Rep. Corinne Brown’s Chinese dragon) might include 47 percent African Americans of voting age, it also comprises precincts that voted overwhelmingly — 70 percent — for Barack Obama.

   How many minorities in a minority access district does it take to elect a minority candidate? How many additional Democrats do we need to enable an African-American access district to put its traditionally Democratic candidate in office? Wouldn’t, say, a 55 percent Democratic majority do the job? After all, to win an election, a candidate needs only 50 percent of the votes plus one additional vote. So why would the powers-that-be see to it that the district is so overwhelmingly Democratic? Read on.

   Lesson Three: Packing and bleaching. When a district is drawn to concentrate (or “pack”) an overwhelming majority of one party into its boundaries, that will, as a result, drain (or “bleach”) that representation from surrounding districts. And so it is with all of Northeast Florida’s minority access districts. When the Florida GOP set about to redraw this region’s U.S. Congressional, state House and state Senate districts a little more than a decade ago, they were happy to relinquish a couple of well-packed districts to the cause of minority access. The problem is, the GOP took all the remaining districts for themselves. That is, all the remaining districts in Northeast Florida — even on the new maps — are solidly bleached. This includes the former district of Sen. Steve Wise, Senate District 5, which, on the proposed map, now reaches northward into Nassau County and all the way to the coast up there. The new line not only preserves a well-bleached district, it draws in the home of former Rep. Aaron Bean, who’s been waiting patiently in line since 2009 for the opportunity to run for Senate.

   As you may have guessed, “bleaching” is a racially charged term, and “bleached” districts refer generally to white, Republican districts. I would apologize for the language, but I didn’t coin the term. Back in the late 1990s, a Washington lawyer named Benjamin Ginsberg came down to Florida to teach the GOP all about “bleaching” and “packing.” � Those map-drawing methods were part of an operation that Ginsberg called “Operation Ratf*ck,” a name that first referred to some nefarious activity during Watergate.

   Lesson Four: With the exception of statewide races like the gubernatorial one, Florida’s state lawmakers get elected in the primaries. With the districts drawn to clearly favor one party, Republicans don’t run in Democratic, minority-access districts. Likewise, Democrats don’t run in the rest of the districts, which, in Northeast Florida, are all held by Republicans. (The exception to this was education advocate and former Channel 4 News anchorperson Deborah Gianoulis Heald, whose advisors and pollsters believed that her unparalleled name recognition could overcome Operation Ratf*ck. They were wrong.)

   What’s the effect of having a noncompetitive district, with a seat guaranteed to one party, which ensures, in turn, a candidate’s ability to win outright in the primary?

   Lesson Five: Moderation and compromise are dead. Consider the political truth, explained to me by Jacksonville University Professor Steven Baker: Primaries attract a party’s most ideological voters. To win his primary, a candidate therefore need only appeal to the party ideologues — not the middle, not the purple, not the moderates — but the extremists. Some lawmakers might even assume that they represent only that tiny fraction of their party’s registrants, the ones who elected them. As a result, Florida’s House of Representatives and Senate become great echo chambers for the ruling Republican party’s dream agenda — going further right than any legislature has gone before. �

   There simply aren’t enough Democrats in the legislature to make a difference, and there won’t be for a while. Secure in their partisan hegemony, the leadership establishes the pecking order and dispenses the instructions: “If you want to belly up to our lobbying trough, you’ll do what we tell you.” If you don’t, you get spanked. Just ask Rep. Mike Weinstein (R-Jacksonville), the only Northeast Florida Republican who’s ever given a flying fig about public school children. Weinstein was relieved of all his education committee assignments for bucking the party on the original teacher pay-for- performance bill, SB 6.

   Lesson Six: It’s not going to change any time soon. Mr. Libby is watching the court cases, and there’s a big one going to the U.S. Supreme Court from that other right-wing fiefdom, Texas. Their laws may differ from ours, but we all fall under the jurisdiction of VRA ’65. The question is whether the courts will bother to look at how packed and bleached these districts end up, and at Ratf*ck’s effect on competitive elections.

   So there you have it in six simple lessons: The reason that “purple” Florida has me seeing red. Hopefully at least some of the children are listening. After all, it’s their future we’ve sold out.

Julie Delegal

Delegal has been a contributing writer for FolioWeekly since 2009