Journalism reveals school voucher waste

If you haven’t read about the Sentinel’s groundbreaking investigative project on school vouchers in Section M of today’s newspaper, stop reading this column now and go read it. Seriously. I’ll wait.

That is what real journalism looks like — a team of journalists doing shoe-leather reporting, conducting the kind of inspections, investigations and interviews that even the state’s education officials don’t.

The “Schools without Rules” series exposed scores of problems at these publicly funded schools — everything from forged safety reports to a school run by a pastor accused of lewd or lascivious molestation.

Just as importantly, it exposed a wicked hypocrisy among politicians who scream for “accountability” for public schools but let anything go when your tax dollars are whisked away to private ones.

This little-regulated system needs an overhaul. And the world needs more real journalists.

Among the findings from reporters Beth Kassab, Leslie Postal and Annie Martin:

Teachers without certification or even college degrees.

Forged documents: Schools faked up clean bills of health from fire departments, which had found safety problems. Even after the schools were caught, state officials let them remain open.

Shady hirings: Two teachers worked at voucher schools (the state calls them “scholarship” schools) after being fired from public schools for having porn on their school computers.

Alleged crime: At one school for special-needs kids, suspicions of impropriety — among parents and even a teacher — continued until authorities arrested the school owner, accusing her of stealing more than $4 million in Medicaid funds.

Troubling finances and learning environments: Two school were evicted from their locations for nonpayment of rent while the school year was still going on. Another shared office-suite space with a bail bondsman. The examples went on and on. There were gobs of problems exposed, many by reporters asking questions that others weren’t.

Critics of the series — including those in the voucher-school machine that continuously wants to expand — took potshots at the Sentinel’s investigatory team for not being comprehensive.

Well, let me tell you something: These three women visited more than 30 schools in six months – that’s more than education officials in this state did in all of last year.

In 2016, education officials inspected only 22 out of nearly 2,000 of the private schools funded with tax dollars and corporate-tax credits.

So, if our team was lame for visiting more than 30 schools in our local community, how ridiculously negligent are state regulators for visiting only 22 state-

wide?

State officials aren’t looking for problems for a simple reason: They don’t want to find them.

That way, they can keep dumping on public schools — bogging them down with tests, regulations and calling them “failure factories” while turning intentionally blind eyes to problems in the voucher schools.

And yes, it’s all public money. They can call the vouchers “scholarships” or “dandelions” for all I care. Or argue that many “scholarships” are paid with corporatetax contributions redirected to schools. But much of it is direct tax dollars, and it’s all public.

Of course not every school is a mess. Whining that the media ignored swell schools to focus on problematic ones is like whining that the media ignore planes that fly safely to report on ones that crash.

One of the most pathetic — and telling — parts of the rebuttal from Step Up For Students, the nonprofit agency that champions voucher schools, was its response to the Sentinel’s revelation that some schools were faking fire-safety reports.

Step Up argued that an earlier Sentinel expose also found fire-code violations at traditional public schools.

In other words: They have problems too!

Here’s what they are missing. We exposed that problem as well. Why? Because we care about the safety of all children.

And let me tell you something else: The response to the Sentinel’s 2003 expose on safety problems at public schools was to fix the problems, lickety split. State and local officials immediately initiated reforms.

If voucher supporters actually cared about the safety and education of these children, they wouldn’t make excuses for all the problems exposed here. They wouldn’t attack the journalists who discovered them.

They would vow to fix them — and implement reforms to make sure they couldn’t happen again.

Instead, Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran — who wants to expand Florida’s nearly $1 billion voucher program — retweeted Step Up’s attack on the series. That’s both lazy and lame. In recent months, I have lavished praise on the speaker for his dogged efforts to promote transparency when it comes to spending public money on tourism efforts. If he has any kind of consistency, he — and all other legislators — will push for the same kind of thorough scrutiny of voucher schools.

The public should be able to see how every tax dollar is spent, how much of it goes to education curriculum, how much of it goes to overhead and how much of it goes to salaries.

He should also push for more regulation to catch safety, financial and criminal violations … so that newspaper reporters don’t have to do it for him.

This newspaper pushes for accountability for all.

If you’re not doing the same, you’re not pushing for accountability. You’re pushing an agenda … at the expense of public money, students’ education and children’s safety.