Editor’s note: This post first appeared as an op-ed in today’s Tallahassee Democrat.
Florida is looking to let 5,700 more underprivileged children attend a private school on scholarship next year, and yet some of the opponents are making it sound like a form of educational Armageddon.
In her Wednesday My View, Fund Education Now co-founder Kathleen Oropeza, whose group plays an important role in pushing for genuine investment in public education, used the Tax Credit Scholarship expansion bill as a rhetorical punching bag. It is “an unprecedented, shameless raid on our most sacrosanct revenue stream — the Florida sales and use tax” or “the largest expansion of private religious-school vouchers in state history” or “sticking taxpayers with the $2 billion tab.” The scholarship program has “zero accountability” and “offers no proof the children are learning.”
These would be heady accusations if they were true. None is.
For the record, the bill that is headed to the House floor will increase the tax credit cap next year, $358 million, by 8.3 percent and by 3.5 percent in the fifth year. For each of the next five years, the cap increase possible under current law would be bumped up by $30 million. Add those all together and you get $150 million, not $2 billion. This bill certainly will help families that have been shut out under the current cap, but it by no means makes history.
The “shameless raid” on sales taxes speaks to a provision that added a sixth tax source against which corporations could claim dollar-for-dollar tax credits. The pool of potential sales tax credits is certainly larger than any of the existing five, but that’s immaterial because the sources are collectively governed by one tax credit cap. Here’s the kicker, though: The sales tax credit has been removed. No bill currently under consideration contains it.
The assertion that there is “no proof the children are learning” ignores the six annual testing reports issued to date by the state Department of Education. Students on the scholarship are required to take nationally norm-referenced tests, and the reports have consistently issued two findings: (1) The students who choose the scholarship are the lowest academic performers from the public schools they leave behind, and (2) scholarship students are achieving the same gains in reading and math annually as students of all income levels. Senate President Don Gaetz has raised a legitimate question about whether scholarship students should take a state, rather than national, test; but the state has plenty of proof about academic performance.
The scholarship program, now in its 12th year, serves 59,765 low-income students in 1,425 schools. Their average household income is only 9 percent above poverty, two-thirds are black or Hispanic, and more than half live with one parent. In a state where 1.5 million PreK-12 students last year chose something other than their traditional neighborhood school, it also happens to be the only school choice option with a statewide cap — and it is turning away tens of thousands of students. As of Sunday, 80,354 students had ready started applications for the fall — about 20,000 ahead of the pace from last year.
This is not to argue that either the bill or the scholarship should be immune from criticism. There are many fair questions for debate, including the proper types of tests and accountability and who should receive scholarships in a program that is based on financial need. But such discourse is made difficult by tactical distortions from either side. Given that this scholarship serves the children who struggle the most and tend to have the fewest options, we owe them a more sober analysis.
Um, you can’t complain about people misusing facts and numbers and then do the same thing right? Oropeza was using the amount of money that SUFS hopes to be paid over the next few years to get her 2 billion dollar figure, but I suspect you knew that.
Furthermore you have to forgive people if they don’t want the industry being tested to be in charge of picking their test. If I let my kids pick their own test I am sure they would do a lot better but I would be unconvinced that real learning was occurring.
Factor in private schools pick who they take and keep and the fact that a few really, really good schools prop up the average of all the schools and there are real concerns that real learning (overall) is occurring.
As for your new attention detail for a wait list, well if past is prologue people have a right to be suspicious.
If you really cared about poor and minority students you would champion additional resources into the schools that serve them that could mitigate poverty, instead of supporting something you stand to make millions off of.
I know several parents who pulled their children out of public school because their child could not pass FCAT. These private school tests to which you refer do not carry the same weight as FCAT so we are comparing apples to oranges. FCAT has serious consequences for property value, student promotion, and teacher pay. None of those things are impacted by the tests used by private schools. Considering the PARCC test had a 70% failure rate in NY, and the new FL test is supposed to be as challenging as the PARCC, I can see why private schools and SUFS refuse to endorse the idea that voucher kids take the new “FCAT” which will be based on the Common Core standards.