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A dubious virtual voucher

The state Constitution and bully politics finally caught up with the signature school voucher plan of the Jeb Bush era, but the indiscriminate push to privatize education is better illustrated by a computer modem and a pot of gold.

The modem is what connects children as young as 5 with private online education, at a cost to taxpayers of $5,200 per student. The pot of gold is the $4.8-million two companies are collecting for being politically connected. With all the attention on Opportunity Scholarships, the "K-8 Virtual School" slipped quietly through the Legislature this year, placing into law an experiment that was slipped into an appropriations bill three years ago.

The concept was sold in part by former U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett, whose company landed one of the initial state contracts. Even the company's own literature admits "it isn't for every family." Needless to say, it only works for students whose parents are home and willing to guide the learning. Whether or not the state should provide materials for home-schooled students is a fair question; whether it should do so at an exorbitant cost is quite another.

The Bennett voucher, in fact, is $1,450 more per student than the state pays for poor children who are on the Corporate Tax Credit voucher. The tax-credit students attend actual schools with actual teachers. The virtual students, by comparison, receive software, instructional materials and use of a computer. The parents do the rest.

The virtual voucher, with a budget that increases to $7.2-million next year, is what happens when corporate lobbyists get hold of eager lawmakers. But it represents only a fraction of Florida's scattered privatization tab. McKay Scholarships for disabled students cost $108.3-million this year; the Tax Credit voucher is budgeted at $88-million, and private prekindergarten may run roughly $185-million.

What is most striking about these investments is how little the state knows about the return it is getting. The polarizing politics and the legal fight that dragged on for seven years have prevented any normal give and take. Not until this year, for example, did lawmakers pass a bill to deal with the embarrassing incidents of financial fraud that have been documented almost since the beginning. At the insistence of private school operators, though, the bill still does not require voucher students to take the same standardized test as public school students.

The remaining voucher programs may well be challenged legally at some point, and Florida may well lose again. Certainly, lawmakers have been on notice and can't easily complain about interest groups that seek to enforce the Constitution. But maybe the next governor can chart a more sensible course, one that doesn't see privatization as an end unto itself. Constitutional issues aside, the private investments must also produce a year's worth of learning in a year's time. If the goal is to leave no child behind, then every education strategy has to be held to the same standard.

[Last modified May 9, 2006, 07:33:31]