New protective measures announced last week are a good start, but it's time to get serious about accountability when it comes to voucher dollars.
Published September 2, 2003
Florida's largest school voucher program gives private groups the job of taking in all the money, up to $88-million this year, and deciding which schools and students get it. Given the enormous responsibility the corporate tax voucher plan vests in these nonprofit groups, you might assume the state Department of Education exercises considerable caution in screening them.
You'd be wrong.
Consider the case of Silver Archer Foundation and the vanishing $410,000:
The Archer Foundation was dutifully certified last year as one of eight "Scholarship Funding Organizations" empowered to collect money and dispense vouchers, even though it was not incorporated or registered in Florida. The foundation is operated by James Isenhour, who, according to the Palm Beach Post, was once charged and acquitted of 56 counts of racketeering and fraud, who once faced cocaine trafficking charges in Hillsborough that were later dropped, who filed for bankruptcy in 1999, who operated a correspondence school that declared bankruptcy. Yet Archer's application was approved so easily that DOE couldn't even produce the documentation.
After being alerted by reporters, Education Commissioner Jim Horne pulled the plug on Archer Foundation. But apparently not before the company took in as much as $410,000 without paying out a dime in vouchers. "They're not telling me anything," Horne said. "They're not responding to my questions and my phone calls and my e-mails."
Give Horne credit for stepping in and demanding some answers. The new protective measures he proposed on Thursday are another step in the right direction. But such problems were bound to happen. The corporate tax voucher law itself, written in 2001, establishes virtually no standards for these organizations, and DOE has written no rules to guide the process. The department has been so lax in its job that it still hasn't decided whether to require a stringent form of auditing for the organizations, even though some of them already have agreed to the higher standard. Silver Archer Foundation, if it chose to respond to Horne's phone calls, could easily argue that it has broken no laws.
This is an embarrassment, not to mention a potential fraud on taxpayers. Under existing law, any school - even one that teaches terrorism - can receive these vouchers. Under existing law, almost any nonprofit organization - including private schools, which can collect the money and then pay themselves - can become a voucher clearinghouse. Horne has been so reluctant to crack down on corporate tax voucher organizations that his most recent "compliance form" exempts them from answering even a consumer-oriented question about the qualifications of teachers in their schools.
The "accountability recommendations" Horne released on Thursday are good as far as they go, particularly the new reporting standards, the ban on schools acting as voucher organizations and the requirement for separate banking accounts for voucher money. But Horne, a former Senate appropriations chairman, ought to appreciate the problem he is creating for lawmakers who must answer for the scandals surfacing in Florida's voucher program.
What does it say that DOE, two years after the program was created, is suddenly holding a press conference to announce that each student should receive no more than one voucher? Horne won't have credibility in the coming legislative debate unless he stops stonewalling and takes an honest look at the role his own department has played in this mess.
In an education system that preaches accountability, voucher dollars have been treated like Monopoly money. Surely, Horne understands why that must end.
