Florida’s public charter schools and tax credit scholarships have a few things in common. Both are growing by at least ten thousand students a year. And both are facing new legal hurdles, or in the case of the scholarships, an outright constitutional challenge.
Daniel Woodring, a former general counsel in the state Department of Education whose clients now include both charter schools and tax credit scholarship parents, says that’s no coincidence. This school year, Florida’s charter schools grew to enroll more than 250,000 students – about one of every 11 children attending the state’s public schools.
Speaking on Saturday to a global gathering of education reform researchers and practitioners in South Florida, Woodring said that growth helps explain why some charter organizations now have to fight legal battles or overcome new roadblocks in the same Florida school districts that approved them a few years earlier, and why even charter schools with solid track records are having trouble opening new schools.
“Their concern is very simple,” he said of districts subjecting charters to new levels of scrutiny. “It’s competition. It’s economics.”
A charter school enrolling 1,500 students represents nearly $10 million in state funding that wouldn’t be flowing into district coffers, so if that school tries to expand, he said, “districts are seeing it as more competition, and they would prefer to hamstring the competition by not letting the school get off the ground.”
The same forces, he said, are helping to drive lawsuits like the one challenging Florida tax credit scholarships, which are administered by scholarship funding organizations like Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog. Woodring represents scholarship parents in that case, in which the teachers union and other plaintiffs argue the program, which this year grew to serve nearly 70,000 students, violates a prohibition on sending taxpayer funding to religious institutions, as well as a requirement that the state provide a “uniform” system of free public schools.
When they announced they were taking the 13-year-old program to court, Ron Meyer, an attorney representing the Florida Education Association, said it reached a “tipping point” this year, due to its explosive growth and legislation passed this year that expanded eligibility.
That might support Woodring’s contention that “competition” and “economics” are driving some of the recent legal travails, but David Barkey of the Anti-Defamation League, a prominent Jewish civil rights organization, told the gathering that groups like his have legitimate philosophical objections that apply more strongly to programs that subsidize private school tuition than they do to charters.
Barkey said organizations like his are deeply committed to the separation of church and state. Jews make up a small fraction of the population, he said, and the majority of the religious schools participating in the tax credit scholarship program likely “aren’t teaching the Shema.”
“We have a long history of discrimination, persecution, attempts at forced conversion,” he said, adding: “For us this isn’t an economic issue. This is a civil-rights issue for us. The separation principle is very important to us.”
While Jewish groups have historically opposed publicly supported programs that involve religious institutions for the reasons Barkey described, that conversation has begun to shift in some quarters, especially in the past few years.
Jewish schools represent some of the proudest participants in Florida’s scholarship program, and Jewish leaders have become vocal advocates for programs that make religious education attainable for low- and middle-income students.
While the growth of school choice has provoked new legal challenges and rekindled long-standing philosophical debates, it may also help court new supporters as programs spread to serve more kids.
