In what is becoming a trite exercise in public relations, state Education Commissioner Jim Horne admitted Thursday that some students have received two school vouchers at the same time, and he will put a stop to it. Said Horne, using an Orlando Christian school as his backdrop, "I will insist that schools comply with the law."
This was Horne's third press conference on vouchers in three months, and he followed a standard protocol of spin control. He slipped the damning revelations into a press conference called to tout proposed legislative reforms. His timing was obvious, as well. A Senate voucher task force is meeting on Tuesday and a Senate committee is expected to release a critical report within two weeks. In PR-speak, that's called "getting ahead of the story."
If Horne spent as much time managing the voucher mess as he did managing the news, he might not be in the spot he's in today. But with each revelation over the past two years, Horne's office has played a studied game of denial. Students getting vouchers for a St. Petersburg school in a broken-down house, in foreclosure, with no license to operate, and no electricity or water for two weeks? Shut it down, hope the story goes away and ignore the reasons it happened. Some $350,000 in vouchers going to an Islamic school in Tampa the FBI claims is a front for terrorism? Issue a Friday-afternoon statement saying the vouchers will be discontinued, and hope the story gets lost in the weekend news. Vouchers going to a home-school group in Boynton Beach with a parent saying she was told the money could be split with her? Hide the dispute from lawmakers, try to hide the records from newspapers, and drop the investigation altogether.
The discovery that a few schools received two vouchers for the same student is simply stunning. How hard, really, is it to make sure that only one payment is issued for each student? Governments do that every day, with Social Security checks or Medicaid payments or Bright Futures college grants. The Department of Education failed because, until last month, it didn't even know which students were receiving corporate tax vouchers. It didn't know because one of the private groups dispensing the vouchers refused to say, and Horne did nothing.
The legislative package Horne is now offering includes some worthy ideas, such as new reporting requirements and standards for organizations and schools receiving corporate tax vouchers. But, given that just two months ago Horne was arguing vouchers should be judged mainly by parental satisfaction, he is not likely to be taken seriously in the Senate. It doesn't help, either, that his own inspector general and the Florida Catholic Conference, which runs private schools receiving vouchers, think he doesn't go far enough. His plan for testing, which is to lump all standardized test scores for voucher students into one pile to be viewed only by a "private research organization," serves mainly to obfuscate.
The laws will indeed need to be changed to bring true accountability to the state's rapidly growing voucher programs, but Horne's role is hard to ignore. He is now on his fourth voucher administrator in little more than two years, and the deadline for his "sworn compliance form" has already slipped two months since it was first announced in August. His department's gaffes have managed to generate embarrassing newspaper stories, investigations by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the chief financial officer, Senate oversight, political agitation, and calls for his dismissal. To hear Horne tell it, though, he's just gotten some bad press. Another press conference surely will do the trick.
