Republicans want to turbocharge privatization of public schools
Broward County business leaders missed a big chance last Friday.
Gov. Ron DeSantis addressed the Broward Workshop, recapping his first active weeks and promising more. Someone should have asked, “Do you intend to privatize public education in Florida?”
Nothing matters more to business owners and business recruiters than a skilled workforce, which depends on good schools. Yet Republican leaders in Tallahassee want to undermine traditional public education and boost an unaccountable system of private schools.
Their vehicle is the program under which corporations get tax breaks for donations that finance private school vouchers. When the program began in 2001, supporters claimed it would target only low-income students who were struggling at traditional public schools. Yet in 2014, Republicans raised the income level for voucher scholarships to $62,000. The median income for a family of four in Florida is $64,000. Legislators made clear that they would broaden the program beyond poor families.
Competing bills this year would allow even more families to qualify. The House bill would set the income threshold at $77,250, roughly $10,000 higher than the Senate bill stipulates, and allow yearly increases. In just four years, a family making almost $100,000 could get a scholarship now worth about $7,000.
Tax breaks alone can’t support such an expansion. So Republicans propose using money from the state treasury.
Diverting money through corporate donations got around the 2006 Florida Supreme Court ruling against a previous voucher program that relied on state money. The court’s new right-wing majority likely would support the publicly-financed voucher expansion and reject the idea that it illegally subsidizes religious schools, even though about 85 percent of schools that accept vouchers are faith-based. Most would fold without the vouchers. In that ruling 13 years ago, the court majority ruled that Florida can’t use public money to create a system that competes with traditional public schools. Competition, however, is what Republicans want. The problem is that they have rigged the game.
The Legislature allows voucher schools to play by different rules. For starters, the roughly 1,800 voucher schools don’t need to hire certified teachers. They don’t need even a high school diploma. In addition, voucher students don’t take the same state-required tests as their public school counterparts. They must take one of three national tests, with results compared nationwide, not in Florida. No one really knows how well the state’s voucher students are doing.
Last October, the Orlando Sentinel published “Schools Without Rules,” its examination of voucher schools. The report underscored the lack of accountability. Example: State law limits how many voucher schools regulators can visit each year. In 2015, the state visited just 27. Only four complied with the few rules that apply. As always, state officials argue that parents’ happiness is the truest accountability. The Department of Education refused to allow interviews of then-Commissioner Pam Stewart or the man who oversees — sort of — the voucher program.
Every business group from the Broward Workshop to the Florida Chamber of Commerce should be asking Republicans how an unaccountable education system could provide good employees and spend public money properly. They need to ask because that’s where Republicans are taking Florida.
Last year, then-House Speaker Richard Corcoran said he wanted to “voucherize the entire system” of public schools. Now Corcoran is commissioner of education. At Corcoran’s urging, the Legislature in 2017 for the first time gave charter schools a share of capital money. Charter schools use public money but are privately managed, many by for-profit companies.
Charter and voucher schools educate only about 13 percent of the state’s K-12 students, but they hold 100 percent of the power in Tallahassee. In a report last year, the Schott Foundation for Public Education rated Florida one of the worst five states for support of traditional schools and called the voucher program “particularly unaccountable.”
U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos used her inherited money to turn Michigan students into lab rats for a vast charter school expansion. The results were disastrous. In 2016, Education Trust-Midwest noted the “systemic decline” of the state’s school system.