School choice critic says drop the suit, but there’s a catch

It’s time to take the fight over the nation’s largest private school choice program out of the courts and into the policy arena.

That’s what John Romano, a Tampa Bay Times columnist who’s been a leading critic of tax credit scholarships, argues in this morning’s paper.

Florida’s First District Court of Appeal dismissed the lawsuit challenging the program in a unanimous decision Tuesday. The court held that the Florida Education Association and other groups did not have standing to bring the case. Among other things, the three-judge panel found the plaintiffs could not show the program harms public schools, and that the case attempts to address policy issues that aren’t for courts to decide. The lawsuit’s backers have less than a month to decide whether to appeal once more.

Romano writes:

Another appeal has got to be tempting, especially since three of the current Supreme Court justices ruled against Gov. Jeb Bush’s original voucher program previously.

But it’s not the proper thing to do right now, either morally or strategically.

Here’s why:

The tax-credit scholarship program — which allows businesses to fund private-school tuition for low-income students in exchange for tax breaks — has been around 15 years, and has not come close to decimating public schools.

It has, however, attracted a lot of supporters among poor and minority parents who have used the vouchers to escape public schools in troubled neighborhoods.

Romano has been a persistent critic of the scholarship program (which Step Up For Students, my employer and the publisher of this blog, helps administer), as well as charter schools.

In the column, which is worth reading in full, he goes on to argue the statewide teachers union and its allies should challenge the program another way. They should demand private schools that accept scholarship students be required to “follow the same rules” as public schools.


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BY Travis Pillow

Travis Pillow is Director of Thought Leadership at Step Up For Students and editor of NextSteps. He lives in Sanford, Fla. with his wife and two children. A former Tallahassee statehouse reporter, he most recently worked at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University, where he studied community-led learning innovation and school systems' responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. He can be reached at tpillow (at) sufs.org.