Truth, lies, ignorance in voucher-school debate

As the debate over discrimination in Florida’s voucher schools heats up with protests in Tallahassee and national media attention, a lot of people are offering hot takes and fiery opinions.

The problem: Many of these hot takes are a hot mess; just steamy piles of factually flawed garbage.

Some claim there’s no public money involved. (Lie. There are hundreds of millions of tax dollars.)

Others claim the companies boycotting the program are opposed to school choice. (Another lie. The companies chose to help fund the voucher program — until they learned that state-approved schools were discriminating against gay families. They’d like to fund it again without the discrimination.)

Others claim the whole to-do is “antireligion.” (It’s not. It’s anti-discrimination. If I’m an anti-Christian warrior, I’m a pretty lousy one, since I’m a lifelong Christian.)

Many people and politicians don’t even seem to understand what they’re protesting.

Take Anthony Sabatini.

When examples of discrimination first started generating headlines last summer, the Lake County GOP state legislator declared the entire debate “completely and totally made up.”

He ignored the evidence the Sentinel had offered — copies of voucher-school policies saying gay families would not be served — to claim at a town hall in August the issue was a manufactured “hit job” on “charter schools.”

The real problem, Sabatini said, was “Crazy Scott Maxwell, whose readership is probably like 50 people.”

It’s nice to know Rep. Sabatini is one of my 50 readers.

It’d be even nicer if Rep. Sabatini knew what he was talking about.

Sabatini’s entire rant was about “charter schools” — something neither the Sentinel nor I have written a single word about with regards to discrimination.

We’ve written about voucher schools.

They are completely different.

Charter schools don’t have a documented discrimination problem. They operate as public schools in Florida and are subject to many of the same standards as traditional public schools. Charters must employ certified teachers, follow the state’s academic standards and are subject to the state’s school-grading system.

Voucher schools — the state-approved private schools where more than 160,000 students can use taxpayer and tax-credit-funded scholarships — don’t have to do any of that.

And these largely unregulated voucher schools — not charters — have been the subject of both the Orlando Sentinel’s “Schools without Rules” series and the latest discrimination debate.

Heck, if lawmakers subjected voucher schools to the same standards as charters, we probably wouldn’t have all these problems.

Maybe we can’t expect all Floridians to understand key distinctions in state law, but it’d be nice if the people who write the laws did.

Really, though, Sabatini is just a bit player in this campaign of misinformation and obfuscation.

Key lawmakers — including education committee chairs Rep. Jennifer Sullivan and Sen. Manny Diaz — have said that, if gay families are denied service at one school, they should just find another.

“That’s one of the beauties of choice … ” Sullivan told the Tampa Bay Times, “Not every school is going to be the best fit for every student.”

Beautiful indeed. As if black families in the 50s needn’t have fretted about all the places that wouldn’t serve them. They should’ve just looked for a better “fit.”

Similarly, Step Up for Students, the nonprofit that earns millions running the state’s voucher program, claims it has seen “no evidence of students being denied enrollment or expelled from private schools due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Well, we have. The Sentinel talked with a lesbian couple — a firefighter and Air Force veteran — whose kids were denied entrance.

Plus, our reporting team documented 83 schools with policies expressly saying they would either expel or refuse to admit gay students.

To say that’s not discrimination would be like saying businesses with “No blacks allowed” signs offered no evidence of discrimination either.

People are free to think what they want about blacks, gays, Jews, Christians or anyone else. That’s one point critics have right. Government can’t force people to change their beliefs. But government shouldn’t fund discrimination.

And make no mistake: We are talking about public money.

Florida’s voucher program has five different “scholarships.” Three are funded directly from general tax dollars. The other two allow car-buyers and corporations to send their tax payments to the voucher program instead of state coffers.

That’s where the latest hubbub comes from. Companies that recently learned of the discrimination have said they’re troubled by it.

So they’re now being attacked, accused of trying to undermine choice and take vouchers from poor, minority children. Hogwash. These companies support school choice. That’s why they helped fund the program! And they’d like to keep funding the program — if the state ensures they aren’t also funding discrimination.

A simple change to state laws — adding LGBTQ families to the list of students who can’t be denied service — is all they want.

Yet voucher defenders like U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio — who accused the companies of “punishing the thousands of underprivileged parents and students” — seem wedded to keeping the discrimination legal.

And that’s the most important point of all: The only issue being debated here is discrimination.

The companies say they don’t want to fund it. Neither should taxpayers.

Guys like Sabatini claim it doesn’t exist. Great. Then updating state laws to make sure it’s not allowed shouldn’t be a problem.