PERSPECTIVE: Virtual vouchers

Florida voters want better schools. Instead, the House is offering them money to give their children online lessons - in other words, to home school them.

Florida voters said last November they were tired of so many schoolchildren being stuffed into each classroom, so the state House has offered a novel response: Let's put them in front of computers at home instead.

That's right. The class size reduction bill that passed on a nearly party-line vote Friday creates a little gift for companies that are peddling Internet learning programs to schoolchildren. The state would pick up the tab, to the tune of $4,800 a child a year, to dispense lessons online. And these virtual schools could serve children as young as 5.

The "K12 Virtual Academy" is the brainchild of William Bennett, former U.S. secretary of education, and his James Madison K12 Academy in Florida is already trying to sign up students for a virtual voucher. The academy boasts of a "high-quality, home-based education program" and advises that: "If you are willing to invest the time in teaching this exciting curriculum, you and your child will see results beyond your expectations." In other words, the virtual school is actually a home school, except that Bennett wants taxpayers to give him a cut of the action.

How offering vouchers to home-school students will reduce class size or save tax money is not clear. Neither is it clear how the House could conceivably grant $4,800 for supplementary computer lessons to home-schooled children when it gives roughly the same amount of money for a full classroom education in public schools and a fourth less than that for vouchers for a full classroom education in private schools. Maybe Bennett, whose company is run for profit, understands these economics.

The House's fancy with virtual schooling is only part of the reprehensible game it is playing with the constitutional directive on class size. Voters said they wanted a better education for children, but the House instead wants to offer less - to encourage students to take fewer courses and to even reduce the number of credit hours required for high school graduation. Its budget pretends to offer $300-million to reduce class size while at the same time telling districts they must operate next year with no money for inflationary costs or salary increases or new students. Forty-two of the state's 67 school districts would actually receive less money next year to do their jobs.

As the House cuts money for books and technology and classroom learning, it has managed to find as much as $200-million to pour into the state's only educational growth industry: private vouchers. It would double, from $50-million to $100-million, a voucher program for poor students that is less than two years old. It would encourage school districts to offer $3,500 vouchers to any student as a way to reduce public-school crowding. It would give $4,800 to any student who wants a virtual education. Incredibly, the House also would give every private kindergarten student in the state a $3,500 check this fall - even those who had no intention of attending public schools and who would therefore not contribute to the class size dilemma the bill purports to remedy.

"I think every voucher they could think of is in there, and they're taking away some of the money from the public schools," said Rep. Heather Fiorentino of New Port Richey, one of only two Republicans who voted against the bill. "I told them (supporters) you can have my vote after you fix it, or after the Senate chews you up and spits you out."

Fiorentino deserves credit for standing up to House Speaker Johnnie Byrd and to his fiction that this assault on public schools was encouraged by voters. The truth is that voters have been emphatic in their desire to improve public schools, whether in county referendums on new taxes or in the class size initiative or the constitutional directive that declares education a "paramount duty."

Floridians aspire to better schools. The House offers virtual ones.

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