After five years, Florida lawmakers still show no interest in seeing that voucher schools aren't stealing - or that students are learning.
Published May 5, 2004
The theft and fraud connected to Florida's school voucher program have produced at least five criminal and administrative investigations to date. But don't bother asking lawmakers to answer for the mess. They left the Capitol last week without doing a thing.
House Speaker Johnnie Byrd, who is widely regarded as the worst legislative leader in state history, is most directly to blame. Byrd, after all, was trying to extort Senate President Jim King in the session's final hours, telling King the House would take up voucher reform only if King agreed to take up one of Byrd's pet bills.
But Byrd was not the only obstacle on this legislative course. Education Commissioner Jim Horne and Gov. Jeb Bush have been so consumed with selling vouchers to a national audience that they have tried to minimize the stunning gaps in oversight in Florida. At a rally in the Capitol shortly after the session began, Horne went so far as to tell voucher supporters that "allowing parents to choose is the morally right thing to do." Does that mean overseeing such schools, to prevent them from stealing and to assure their students are learning, is morally wrong?
The lack of voucher controls traces to Horne himself, who spent much of the first two years in his job arguing that voucher schools needed no oversight because unsatisfied parents could simply move their children. As he looked the other way, the evidence of abuse mounted: a St. Petersburg school with broken windows, overgrown vegetation and no license to operate; parents being asked to sign powers of attorney at a Panhandle school, which led to the state's sending $146,268 in checks for students who no longer attended; a Tampa Islamic school the FBI claimed was a base for terrorism; a Boynton Beach group taking vouchers for disabled students who were being taught in their homes; an Ocala businessman in bankruptcy and with a history of racketeering charges who was handed $268,000 in voucher money that he never gave to children; two schools in Seminole and Orange counties that had their charters revoked by school boards because of uncertified teachers and declining test scores, only to reopen as private schools supported by state vouchers.
On the session's final day, as lawmakers were failing to pass any voucher reforms, Bush offered a particularly disingenuous declaration. Never mind, he said: "We'll implement most of these reforms ourselves." Really? The first voucher program is now 5 years old. What has he been waiting for?
Bush is right in one respect. There is much the Department of Education can do, and there are encouraging signs that the latest choice director (the seventh in the past three years under Horne), Theresa Klebacha, is taking the job seriously.
More to the point, current law does give DOE authority to stop some of the worst abuses. Current law, for instance, says that parents of voucher children "must restrictively endorse" each state check. That provision was intended to prevent payments for phantom children. Current law also says that vouchers for disabled students can go only to a "private school of choice" that meets "state and local health and safety laws and codes." That provision was intended to exclude home-schooling. Current law says that online school vouchers are to go only to "students who were enrolled and in attendance at a Florida public school during the prior school year." That provision was intended to exclude incoming kindergarteners and home-school students.
In each case, though, Horne has either ignored the law or claimed it gave insufficient legal authority to DOE. In fact, Horne held a press conference in October to make precisely the opposite point the governor is now making. After unveiling proposed legislative changes, Horne said, "These reforms will give me the tools, and the teeth, to do the job everyone wants me to do." Maybe he was just kidding.
The truth is that neither the Legislature nor Bush has shown any inclination to bring to voucher schools the type of accountability they insist for public schools. This year, as many as 13,000 high school seniors may be denied a diploma because they failed a standardized test that is not even given in most voucher schools.
Florida, which is now the nation's No. 1 supplier of school vouchers, is spending $139-million this year without any serious attempt to determine whether voucher students are actually learning. The educational standards for these schools are so embarrassingly low that many of the state's established private school organizations, including the Florida Catholic Conference, are themselves asking the state to set the bar higher. But Bush and Horne have resisted calls for testing and accreditation. Now they say all that's needed is a little sprucing up at DOE. Who could possibly believe them?
