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| Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam after speaking at the Spring 2016 FAMU Commencement Ceremony |
The Tampa Bay Times reported on a talk Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Adam Putnam, a Republican candidate for governor, gave before the Florida Chamber of Commerce Learners to Earners Workforce Summit on June 12th.
According to the newspaper, “he said the state needed to set standards that all universities must meet and new metrics to compare those schools to their peers in other states.”
Alexander, an alumnus of Florida A&M University, co-led a bipartisan effort to overhaul the PBF metrics during the last legislative session with House Majority Leader Ray Rodrigues, R-Estero. Alexander and Rodrigues don’t think it’s right to compare State University System of Florida (SUS) schools with different sizes and missions against each other for PBF.
“I have a solution to the problem,” Alexander said during a Virtual Town Hall Meeting in December. “There’s something called ‘peer institutions.’ And so my recommendation is that…we need to judge all our state universities based off other peer institutions.”
He explained that “‘peer institutions’ means based off size of the school, budget, focus, types of programs that you offer…”
“My recommendation is that each state university provide a justification document of four to five peer institutions around the United States,” Alexander said. He says the PBF metrics for each university should be set based on competing against those peer institutions. Alexander mentioned Howard University and North Carolina A&T University as examples of peer institutions that might be included in the justification document for FAMU.
Alexander and Rodrigues got the legislature to pass a requirement for the Florida Board of Governors to make recommendations for “the equitable distribution of performance funds” by October 1, 2019. The News Service of Florida reported that the recommendations should aim at providing PBF money for “‘continuous improvement’ by the schools regardless of how they are ranked against each other.”
A May 25-May 31 poll by the Saint Leo University Polling Institute shows that Putnam continues to lead when matched up with all the other Republican and Democratic candidates for the governorship. But many voters are still undecided.