Kids need resources, not vouchers
A Times EditorialPublished January 8, 2006
Those who are predicting educational doom from the loss of Florida's first voucher program need a reality check. The 733 vouchers may represent the most contentious and least effective part of a plan Gov. Jeb Bush considers the cornerstone of school accountability.
Just consider this one measure alone: Of the roughly 33,000 students who were told in the past three years their schools are chronic failures, only 733 are now on private vouchers. That's 2 percent.
The rest want a public school that serves their needs, and the voucher debate is just politics to them. Those families and the rest of the 2.6-million students in Florida public schools are much less interested in a state Supreme Court ruling that invalidates Opportunity Scholarships than they are in teachers who know what they're teaching and classrooms that aren't overcrowded.
Bush acknowledged Thursday that vouchers may not be as critical to his A+
Plan objectives as they were in 1999. Principals and teachers are now losing their jobs because of low standardized test scores, a fate that provides considerably more motivation than the loss of students to private schools.The benefit of standardized tests is that they can help districts pinpoint the schools where students are at greatest risk. But those students aren't served by a law that sends only a handful of them to untested private alternatives. They are served by a state that is willing to provide more resources and attention. To that end, vouchers only get in the way.
The obstacles facing some of the schools deemed as chronically failing are not simple ones. At Miami Edison Senior High School, for example, three-fourths of the students are poor, one in five speak another language at home, and one in seven are diagnosed with a learning disability. That's one reason the Department of Education's "Assistance-Plus" plan, which provides more sanctions than resources, has so far fallen short.
Many of those in Tallahassee who are so eager to fight the court's ruling are the same ones who have resisted any accountability provisions for voucher schools. If the Opportunity Scholarship was intended to motivate public schools to improve, then why would lawmakers also have adopted four other types of vouchers that are handed out regardless of whether the public schools are succeeding or failing? If the vouchers are intended to provide a better education than public schools, then why aren't the private schools held to the same standards?
Bush already has talked about wanting to add yet another voucher plan this spring that would allow students with poor reading test scores to go to private schools. The court's opinion already makes clear the unconstitutionality of such a plan, but the governor can't credibly argue the educational merits anyway. If public schools are failing to teach reading, then give them the tools and resources to do better. Handing out as many as 170,000 new vouchers does nothing to improve the instruction.
Those who contend vouchers motivate teachers to do a better job haven't visited a classroom lately.