Posted on 05/18/2019 12:27:57 AM PDT by SoConPubbie
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law on Thursday Florida’s fifth school voucher program, creating a path for up to 18,000 more students to receive state scholarships to attend private school and expanding what is already the nation’s largest school-choice effort.
The new Family Empowerment Scholarship “will help children realize their potential and give parents the power to do what is best for their children,” DeSantis said on Twitter.
The governor touted the new, and controversial, voucher program in cross-state visits to three private Christian schools that take Florida’s other school scholarships, often dubbed vouchers.
He first stopped in Jacksonville, then in St. Petersburg and signed the bill at a Seventh-day Adventist school in Miami Gardens, completing what his press office described on Twitter as “victory lap for Florida parents and students!”
DeSantis and and Republican leaders in the Florida Legislature pushed the new program as one of their key priorities during the just-ended 2019 legislative session in Tallahassee.
They said it would help children from low-income families whose parents are unhappy with their assigned public school but cannot afford private school. The new scholarship program could serve children in middle-class families, too, with the income limit set at nearly $80,000 for a family of four.
The new scholarship program is estimated to cost the state $130 million, with the cost per child set at 95 percent of that spent on a public-school education. It will start in the 2019-20 school year.
Most Democrats in the House and Senate voted against the education bill (SB 7070), criticizing Florida’s voucher programs as vehicles for sending public money to private, often religious, schools that do not have to meet the standards on academics, teacher credentials or facilities the state imposes on public schools.
Private schools that take the scholarships, for example, do not need to hire teachers who’ve earned college degrees
(Excerpt) Read more at orlandosentinel.com ...
The trouble with any school voucher program is that there just aren’t that many other schools to go to. While great in theory, it’s hard in practice because what good is a voucher to go to another school if one doesn’t exist?
Despite astonishment at public school costs, it’s expensive to run a school. The first hing everyone wants is high quality teachers and to pay them less than what current public school teachers make. Same with administrators and pretty much all staff. I think people’s expectations regarding private schools are going to have to be tempered with the reality of running any school, especially one with high quality a staff.
There just aren’t that many conservative people willing to accept less income than what they could earn in public schools, even with the public schools’ built-in leftist biases. So what to do? Build and run more private schools, of course, but you’re also going to have to force the closure of all the public schools so those who would continue teaching will have no other choice but to teach in private schools at much lower pay, benefits, and worker protections.
And then again what are you going to do with all the special ed kids? Educating a regular Joe or Jenny doesn’t cost $10,000 grand a year, but SPED Sally or Sam costs a small fortune to provide all their federally-mandated requirements. Republicans have periodically been in charge of the Federal government in the last few decades but I’ve never seen them roll-back some of the more onerous laws and requirements placed on schools dictating the equal outcome expectations on schools for SPED kids. It’s expensive and what drives up costs but no one really talks about it.
Public schools in inner cities are wildly expensive, but that’s where all the poor kids live, and they get free transportation to school, free breakfasts and lunches, free textbooks and computers and wifi, and large in-school med clinics, all because federal laws mandate these items be provided to those below the poverty threshold (which are about all the kids in the inner cites). Even private schools are going to have to provide these services, are they not? It’s all very expensive all ‘round.
So there aren’t many private, non-leftist schools to take your voucher to. Solutions? Not many. One would be for more conservatives to go into teaching and that may help with the ideology of the current public schools making a voucher school unnecessary, but not with the costs involved.
Plus, it seems to me that the very same personality traits that leads one into teaching causes them to gravitate toward a leftist ideology—the “I must help you because deep down I think that you can’t help yourself and I self-actualize myself and my existence by doing so”. Teachers seem to define “help” by doing things for the kids rather than helping the kids help themselves. Seems like every generation since the advent of public school model seem to be more and more helpless and more desiring of government assistance to get them through life.
Perhaps the only real way to teach people is to abandon the entire school model. Parents homeschooling their own followed by self-study and then apprenticeships in commerce and business at all levels not just vocational (what school was like before the public school model) may be the best way. But could we ever put the genie back in the bottle as a culture and return to that lifestyle to pull off schooling in that manner ever again?
Lots of stream of consciousness here this morning thanks for reading.
Start slow and the private schools will emerge. Many, many teachers take less pay to get away from the fascist public schools.
Perhaps there are not many private schools where you are but in Florida they rule.
You’re spot on with all those comments as far as I can see.
The fundamental problem with the public school model is the lack of consequences for failure. In the public sector, if you stink at your mission as badly as many public school systems do, the marketplace rewards you appropriately and you go out of business, because someone else provides a better product/service and the customers go there.
With public schools, you have a government-mandated quasi-monopoly. Sure there are private schools, but you have to pay that tuition on top of the tuition that’s in your property tax bill.
This voucher system is an attempt to start putting in place an alternate to the quasi-monopoly model, so that eventually everyone gets a voucher and schools all compete for students and their vouchers.
I completely misread DeSantis. Before he was elected, when he was a guest on FNC a lot, I saw him as another do-nothing big talker. I’m really impressed with all he’s accomplished already in his first term. A accolyte of Donald J. Trump, methinks.
No, it is not that expensive to operate a school with excellent, high paid teachers. Where the expense comes from in public schools, is the bloated staff and more expensive is the retirement fund which is way too high.
I wonder what's controversial about it, or is it only that liberals are against vouchers?
Great post. I think until the vouchers go unused for lack of alternative schools, then full steam ahead. Just because some don’t have an alternative school to go to, shouldn’t be a point against vouchers, not to imply you are saying that. PA pays private cyber schools 70% of your local per student costs to the cyber school. The local public school gets the remaining 30%. It’s a win win for everyone. The local public school gets paid to NOT feed,bus and educate your child. Of course the teacher unions are still opposed, but cyber schools solve your issue of school alternatives.
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