The systematic privitization of Florida's public schools

From Scathing Purple Musings

by Bob Sykes

The Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy issued a report that serves as a stunning rebuke of not only the most recent legislative session’s education agenda, but also of the one dominated by republicans over the last four years. The report, researched and written by Alan Stonecipher, includes easy to discern supporting data. Here are the report’s key findings:

· Florida is pursuing education privatization further and faster than any other state. New laws in effect for the 2011-12 school year expand eligibility and funding for school choice programs. Florida already is the leader nationally in the number of students and tax dollars appropriated in voucher programs.

· While they cut funding for public schools, legislators expanded every alternative to traditional public schools. They directed tens of millions of dollars into programs that serve students in private schools and those operated by for-profit educational management companies. Some Florida policymakers want to go even further: establishing a voucher program that would give public money to parents to pay their child’s tuition in private schools.

· Policymakers have expanded these choice programs despite a consensus among researchers that voucher and charter school programs perform no better than traditional public schools.

· Evidence accumulates that choice programs hurt traditional public schools.

· These changes in the state’s education system move Florida further away from providing a uniform system of free public schools, as the state constitution requires.

· To increase the possibility that a new voucher program would be found constitutional, the legislature has placed a proposed constitutional amendment on the 2012 ballot to remove language prohibiting public funding of private schools, including religious schools.

· These programs and additional expansions constitute a risky experiment with the education of Florida’s 2.6 million public school students and with the schools that serve them.

Stonecipher’s report is an easy read. It’s predictable that the FCFEP report will be demonized as union propaganda as several board members have strong ties to labor groups. But the data in the report cannot be brushed aside with accusations of partisanship as much of it comes from state. Stonecipher concludes:

Florida’s push for more and more school choice increasingly disrupts the traditional public school system upon which the nation and Florida have relied since the 19th century. While public school funding shrinks, choice programs and the tax dollars appropriated to them have expanded, with less oversight than provided to public schools.

Little evidence exists that choice programs are better than public schools. Nevertheless, Florida policymakers have enacted the largest array of such programs in the nation. Choice advocates increasingly push education privatization – including creation of a universal voucher program that would provide for any child in Florida to use tax dollars to pay private schools and for-profit companies.

Expanding choice programs on this scale amounts to a risky experiment, attempted by no other state, with Florida tax dollars, its public schools, and the children who attend them.

No state is as advanced as Florida in its efforts to privatize education. It may be that the most important part of this report is that it may help change what Florida’s education reform efforts are called. Education reformers don’t like having their agenda labeled as “privatization.” They don’t want voters to know what their up to.

http://bobsidlethoughtsandmusings.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/report-florida-legislatures-exapnsion-of-education-privatization-a-risky-experiment-and-traditional-public-schools-suffer/