Efforts to defend Florida’s tax credit scholarship program, the largest private school choice program in the country, have gained a powerful new ally: Miami Bishop Victor T. Curry. One of Florida’s most influential ministers, Curry used his radio program Nov. 11 to rally supporters against the lawsuit filed in August by the Florida teachers unions, Florida School Boards Association and other groups. You can read excerpts below.

Until the suit was filed, Curry had been a quiet supporter of the 13-year-old scholarship program; the school he heads, Dr. John A McKinney Christian Academy, serves about 120 scholarship students. But it’s clear from the remarks he made during the radio program that he is now all in.

It's also clear the lawsuit is getting more attention in the press and beyond. A number of media outlets have noted exit polls that show Republican Gov. Rick Scott gained ground among reliably Democratic black voters (see here, here and here). The latest: This Nov. 22 op-ed in the Miami Herald by Christopher Norwood, a member of the Democratic Black Caucus of Florida. Scott's gains among black voters, he wrote, are "remarkable for a candidate who had no urban agenda, except for corporate scholarships for low-income students, an issue that's overlooked by Democratic strategists ... "

Curry's comments have been edited slightly for length and clarity. (You can hear some of them by clicking on the audio box below.) As always, we note the scholarship program is administered by nonprofits such as Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog.

We can’t keep talking out of both sides of our mouths. Some of the very people that vote against this, and those who are a part of this lawsuit, parade themselves in our churches and in our communities and they tout that they want the best of education for our children. Well, we have to be holistic in our approach. We never said that private is the only tool. Or public is the only tool. For some children, private is the best fit. I am hoping and praying that there will be a change of minds and a change of hearts and hoping that someone will have the sense to just drop this suit …

I believe, fervently, in public education. I was just given a major award (by the Florida Education Association) … I have always supported United Teachers of Dade and I’ve always supported the Broward Teachers Union. Listen, I worked as a teacher’s assistant at South Area Alternative School right across from Hallandale High. I was a teacher’s assistant at MacArthur Senior High School. Yes I was. And I also spent a few years in Miami-Dade County in a classroom at Civil Bluff Elementary and part of a year at Madison Middle School.

I am not, and I will never, ever be, anti-public education. I am able to walk and chew gum at the same time. … These scholarships that we’ve been talking about are very much a part of our collective moral commitment to provide equal educational opportunities for our children. They strengthen public education, not diminish it.

We named (the Dr. John A. McKinney Christian Academy) after a man who spent 35 years in public education. Dr. John A. McKinney was the first principal who opened Turner Tech. His wife spent over 25 years in public education as a principal, as a school teacher. Ronda C. McKinney. Our whole education wing is the Dr. John and Ronda McKinney Educational Wing.

So we support public education but at the same time there has always been private education as well as public education. This is not a competition. It is not about public or private. It is about matching each child with a school that works best for him or her. It’s about giving children, and their parents, options so they can find the one that works best for them.

I have a question. Why would the school boards association wait 13 years to file a lawsuit against this program? If it claims the constitution restricts children to attending only schools that are operated by the district, why not challenge the charter schools, or McKay scholarships for disabled students, or vouchers for 4-year-olds. Why single out poor children? (more…)

The Republican leadership in one of Florida’s biggest counties passed a resolution Monday night condemning the Florida School Boards Association and other groups for filing suit against the state’s tax credit scholarship program and potentially snuffing out academic options for nearly 70,000 low-income students.

The strongly-worded resolution by the Republican Executive Committee in Duval County, a conservative stronghold that includes the city of Jacksonville, calls on all registered Republicans to stand in opposition to the suit. It also urges those elected to serve on school boards to “take all appropriate measures to force the Florida School Boards Association to remove itself as a litigant.”

“They’re denying children an opportunity to get a good education and they’re doing it strictly for dollars,” Rick Hartley, chairman of the Republican Party of Duval County, told redefinED. “They’re fighting over dollars and they don’t care about the kids. That’s not appropriate.”

The move in Duval is the latest example of pushback following the suit’s filing on Aug. 28. Florida’s 13-year-old tax credit scholarship program is the largest private school choice program in the nation, with 67,000 students enrolled this fall, nearly 70 percent of them black or Hispanic. Evidence shows the students tended to be the lowest performers in the public schools they left behind.

In the suit’s aftermath, state Sen. John Legg, R-Trinity, a key education leader with a reputation for listening to all sides, declined to accept the FSBA’s “Legislator of the Year” award; state Sen. Jack Latvala, R-Clearwater, a moderate with close ties to teachers unions, expressed concern about the potential displacement of low-income students; and a handful of local school board members around the state penned newspaper op-eds denouncing it.

Duval isn’t the only county where Republican leaders are taking action. Last week, the executive board of the REC in neighboring, suburban Clay County passed a similar resolution, which will go before the full membership next week. Leslie Dougher, who heads the Clay REC, is also chairwoman of the Republican Party of Florida. (more…)

The Florida School Boards Association is facing some pushback from within its own ranks for moving to end the nation's largest private school program program.

In recent days, three local school board members - Jason Fischer from Duval County, Jeff Bergosh from Escambia County and Dale Simchick from Indian River County - all weighed in with op-eds in their local newspapers. All three criticized the lawsuit that the FSBA and others filed Aug. 28 against the state's tax credit scholarship program, which, if successful, could dramatically curb educational options for tens of thousands of low-income families.

The 13-year-old program, which never faced a standalone legal challenge until now, provides scholarships for low-income students to attend more than 1,400 participating private schools. It is expected to serve nearly 70,000 students this school year, more than 70 percent of them minorities. The program is administered by scholarship funding organizations like Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog.

The suit “literally asks a judge to uproot these 67,000 students from schools that appear to be working for them, leaving particularly urban districts in the position of scrambling to find room for them,” Simchick wrote on TCPalm.com, which serves Indian River, St. Lucie and Martin counties. “This feels more like a temper tantrum than a strategy for helping disadvantaged children.”

In his piece for the Pensacola News Journal, Bergosh quoted letters he received from parents in support of the program, then wrote: “Instead of listening to biased, self-obsessed labor unions and other special interest lobbying entities, I’m listening to my constituents; I’m in agreement with them and together we are on the right side of this issue. I hope Florida legislators and other education leaders with courage will listen to students, parents, and taxpayers that benefit from this worthwhile program, too.”

It’s unclear how much dissent there may be amongst other rank-and-file school board members. The FSBA leadership did not consult members before voting in June to proceed with the suit, which also includes the Florida Education Association, Florida PTA, Florida NAACP and other groups as plaintiffs. (more…)

If truth is the first casualty of war, then Florida School Boards Association executive director Wayne Blanton may have been suiting up back in June. His Capital Dateline interview then with Steve Wilkerson described tax credit scholarships for low-income students as a financial drain not only on public schools but on all state government services.

Blanton, a seasoned educator, knows better. So let’s assume the association’s planned lawsuit against the scholarship, to be announced today, was his motivation.

Blanton’s financial assertion is short enough to quote in full:

“We are not a big fan of those type of scholarships. There’re a couple of reasons. No. 1, it’s taking a substantial amount of money every year away from public schools. But the bigger issue, I think, is over the next two years those corporate scholarships are going to siphon off about 2 to 2 ½ billion dollars from the state. Now making my assumption earlier that we get 36 percent of that, for every $1 billion that would be $360 million that public schools do not get. But then there’s over $600 million that doesn’t come into the state at all. It doesn’t come in for child care, it doesn’t come in for health services, it doesn’t come in for the Division of Family Services and things of that nature, it doesn’t come in for corrections. Those dollars not coming into the state are not just detrimental to public schools, it’s detrimental to a lot of other services the state is trying to deliver and has a hard time getting those dollars to them now. So I think we’ve got to take a real close look at that in the big picture – not just education but how those dollars are disappearing from a lot of other entities.”

Readers should be aware that I’m the policy director for Step Up For Students, a nonprofit that co-hosts this blog and helps administer the scholarship that Blanton calls into question. But his misstatements are at such odds with the fiscal reality that they are rebutted by basic state revenue reports and fiscal evaluations.

Let’s begin with the “siphon.” Under state law, the amount of tax credits that can be used toward contributions for the scholarship is capped every year. The Department of Revenue is responsible for overseeing the cap, and here is the link to its latest calculation. The maximum possible amount for scholarships in the next two years is in fact $805.1 million – not $2.5 billion. That’s one-third the amount that Blanton claimed.

Now let’s look at how the loss of those dollars is “detrimental” to all those public services, including schools. (more…)

From the News Service of Florida:

TWO AMENDMENTS IN TROUBLE, POLL SHOWS

Two of the more controversial proposed constitutional amendments face a difficult path to approval, according to a Suffolk University/WSVN-TV poll released late Tuesday. The survey of 600 likely voters showed both Amendment 6, barring the use of taxpayer money for health insurance that covers abortion, and Amendment 8, doing away with a prohibition on the use of taxpayer money for faith-based social services, are well below the 60 percent support needed to gain approval.

Just 44 percent of those surveyed said they supported Amendment 6, while 40 percent said they were opposed. Meanwhile, 52 percent said they opposed Amendment 8, while just 28 percent approved. The poll, conducted Sept. 27-30, has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

Amendment 8's leading opponents say the measure is about private school vouchers, even though the legal landscape shows that's not really the case. Our latest take on the debate here.

Our preoccupation these days with a Florida amendment removing the state’s no-aid-to-religion clause may strike some redefinED readers as a touch obsessive, and we won’t argue the point. But the truth is that we agonize over whether to write at all, and we want to explain why.

At the end of the day, we are confident that Amendment 8, whether it passes or fails, will have no legal effect on school vouchers. And yet opponents so far have invested $1 million in a campaign that argues otherwise. They not only contend the amendment will open the door to new vouchers, but that those programs will be, to borrow the words of one elected Alachua County school board member, “the very death of public schools.”

So the quandary is obvious. We’re a blog built around the new definition of public education, run by an organization that administers private options to low-income students, and we think we can bring clarity to the issue. But how do we complain about a debate that we say is falsely about vouchers without being viewed as though we doth protest too much? How do we enter the volatile, polarizing world of political campaigns and not be viewed as an angry combatant?

This is shaping up as a most peculiar campaign. The pro- and anti-amendment forces are on two entirely different planets, one fighting against the scourge of vouchers and the other extolling the virtues of faith-based community services. And yet the legal landscape is unmistakable: The state Supreme Court overturned Opportunity Scholarship vouchers in 2006 through a public education uniformity clause that would be untouched by this amendment. In other words, the principle barrier to any new vouchers is not on the ballot. That’s one of the reasons, and this is important to note again, that no groups supporting parental choice are spending a penny on this campaign. They see it as legally irrelevant.

We admit taking offense at some of the liberties that have been taken so far with the legal truth. And we’re left only to speculate on why the opponents would spend so much on an amendment that means so little in the education world. (more…)

To allegedly help parents understand Amendment 8, one of Florida's biggest school districts has distributed 69,000 fliers, punctuated by scary claims, in all of its school lobbies and reception areas. "VOTE ON NOVEMBER 6," they say. "Amendment 8 could impact your public school."

The Orange County school district tells redefinED the fliers don't cross the line into advocacy because they're for informational purposes and state, at the top, "IT'S YOUR DECISION." But the fliers are filled with the same misinformation being spread far and wide by the Florida Education Association, Florida School Boards Association and Fund Education Now - and left unchallenged by Florida journalists.

"If Amendment 8 passes, potentially billions of state dollars could be diverted from public schools," the flier says. "If Amendment 8 passes, public funds could be redirected into private hands by funding the education of hundreds of thousands of students in private and religious schools."

Not true. We've detailed why here and here. Amendment 8 would remove the no-aid to religion language in the Florida Constitution, which is a proposition that deserves debate. But to suggest it opens the door to private school vouchers is more than a stretch; it's wrong. Like the same claims made at school board meetings and in press releases, the ones on the district fliers don't offer any supporting evidence - and, as far as we can tell, no reporters have asked for any. In Florida, truth continues to go off the rails.

There are times when it’s appropriate for a journalist to boil down a story into a he-said, she-said. And there are times when it’s just lackluster reporting.

As Jon East has noted in this blog post and this op-ed, Florida’s Amendment 8 – the “religious freedom amendment” – is not about private school vouchers. It’s clear if you look at the legal history for private education options in Florida. It’s clear if you look to see who is and isn’t bankrolling the campaign.

And yet, one news story after another has allowed the Florida Education Association, the Florida School Boards Association and other school choice critics to posit that it is about vouchers – and to let those assertions go unchallenged. Often it’s in terms so deep into an alternate reality, they beg for a little scrutiny. According to the Gainesville Sun, for example, an Alachua County School Board member described Amendment 8 as “the very death of public schools.”

With six weeks left before the vote, statements like these are surfacing in major newspapers nearly every day. Here are a few examples, along with how the story captures the legislative intent of the amendment, the constitutional underpinnings of school vouchers, the lack of a campaign or financial support by school voucher advocates, the factual history of private options in a state that now provides them to more than 200,000 students, or just some form of a statement from those with an opposing view:

From the South Florida Sun Sentinel (Aug. 21):

“Amendment 8 would remove the long-standing restriction in the Florida Constitution that prohibits the expenditure of public funds to support religious programs," the resolution (from the Broward County School Board) reads. "Passage of Amendment 8 could result in state funds being awarded to non-public schools, instead of allocated to support public and charter schools.”

The resolution stops short of saying whether those would be good or bad outcomes, but it was obvious where board members stood.

"We have a limited amount of resources, and you would continue to strain the resources for public and charter schools," board member Robin Bartleman said.

Response from other side: None

Supporting evidence: None

***

From the Daytona Beach News Journal (Sept. 15):

The title and wording of the amendment were the subject of a lawsuit in which Ormond Beach school principal Susan Persis and Palm Coast rabbi Merrill Shapiro were plaintiffs.

They and other representatives of school-related organizations and clergy tried to get the amendment thrown off the ballot, but a judge allowed it to go before voters after Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi rewrote the proposal.

Persis said she fears passage of Amendment 8 would divert money from public schools to religious ones. "This would further reduce funding for public education," said Persis, who's principal of Pine Trail Elementary. "Any further reduction will be devastating to our schools." (more…)