Florida school voucher bill gambling with our children’s future
The universal voucher bill smacks of the Florida Lottery hustle. Lottery proponents promised the funds would provide extra money for public schools. Hooray! I voted for it, you voted for it, and we all got hustled. It wasn’t long before the lottery funds began supplanting rather than supplementing.
So now comes the great universal voucher giveaway, putting $8,000 ESAs (Empowerment Savings Accounts) into private pockets. Everyone rich or poor, line up to get your free money. The sales pitch was very clever, using words like “donations”, “scholarships”, and “choice” to sugarcoat transferring public funds to private pockets. ESAs use taxpayer money for private schools, homeschooling, as well as a growing cottage industry of school-supply vendors.
The voucher sales pitch relies on key talking points such as:
TP 1: Disparage traditional public schools. Call them “Government Schools” with malicious intent to indoctrinate your child. Claim that public schools will not be harmed because those students who leave no longer need to be taught. What? Tell that to the teacher who still has 20 kids to teach despite losing a few. The district still must cover her salary and other fixed expenses. Teachers are not paid by the child.
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TP 2. Claim money doesn’t matter. This one really hurts. Let’s compare the resources of a typical classroom teacher compared to the FSU women’s basketball team. There are 10 players on the team. Coach Brooke Wycoff has a staff of 19, including three assistant coaches. As a beginning teacher, I had 39 fourth graders with no assistant. I know that my students would have had a much greater chance at success if I had had even half of what Coach Wycoff has. Money does count.
TP 3: Parents know what is best for their child. In a perfect world, that would be true. Ask the thousands of foster children if their parents made good choices. And the voucher bill provides no protections for parents to make informed choices, such as revealing that a child with disabilities loses their civil rights at a private school not required to follow Federal law requiring IEPs (Individual Education Plans).
TP 4: Funding children rather than systems. This is nonsense. Systems are essential for society to function. We need health care systems, military systems, banking systems, transportation systems, etc. Systems have expertise, trained personnel, efficient infrastructures, and accountability. The anti-systems argument is the true reveal that the goal is to dismantle and destroy our public education system, still educating 80% of our children.
The universal voucher bill gambles with our children’s future. There will be a few winners, but mostly losers, as our public education system is discarded like a losing lottery ticket.
Sally Butzin is a retired educator, having taught in public, private, and charter schools. She was founder and director of the Institute for School Innovation, a non-profit seeking to improve teaching and learning.
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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Universal school vouchers a gamble with our children’s future
