Voucher schools: End fraud, excuses

Florida’s voucher schools seem like an old sofa.

The more you lift up the cushions, the more dirt you find.

For years, Florida politicians happily siphoned your tax dollars away from public schools to private ones where you didn’t know what on earth happened with your money.

Well, for the past year, a team of Orlando Sentinel reporters has been looking — since state officials won’t. And what they have found keeps getting scarier.

First, the Sentinel found schools faking safety reports, hiring felons, defrauding taxpayers, hiring high-school dropouts as teachers and operating in second-rate strip malls, sometimes even getting evicted in the middle of the school year.

More recently, the reporters started looking at the curricula — and found books that tell kids that dinosaurs frolicked alongside man and that, prior to the civil rights movement, “most black and white southerners had long lived together in harmony.” Workbooks asked third-graders in voucher schools if they could identify things like an apple or a cake while third-graders in public schools were working on reading comprehension.

Scholastic experts found much of the curriculum deficient. One called it “plain-old, misguided, bad, horrible science.”

So I have a five-part plan to help fix things — to promote accountability and make sure children actually get educated.

But first, let’s talk about how the voucher industry — and it is an industry, funded by nearly $1 billion of your tax dollars and corporate tax credits — has responded.

With whining, deflection and excuses.

Specifically, voucher advocates — including some of the schools and Step Up For Children, the nonprofit that made about $18 million administrating the vouchers last year — have responded in four whiny ways.

■ Deflection. Step Up’s favorite tactic whenever we expose a horror story at a voucher school is to point to some public school and say: See, they have problems,

too! What they don’t tell you is that we’re usually the ones that reveal those problems as well. The Sentinel has exposed firesafety violations, shoddy teachers, absentee school board members and struggling public schools. In every case, the public schools’ response wasn’t excuses or deflection. It was to fix those problems. We want to fix problems no matter where they happen. Why don’t you? (And really, “But he does it too!” is an excuse most parents wouldn’t tolerate from a 4-year-old.)

Claims of faith-bashing. What malarkey. I’m a lifelong Christian, a church elder and former Sunday school teacher. I’m not opposed to Christianity. I’m opposed to ignorance. And child endangerment. And de-