Does Doug Tuthill step up for children or sell out children?

After reading Doug Tuthill’s opening shot against public education, in a opinion piece to the Times Union, Florida needs a thriving public education system, and parents want schools that fit their own children’s needs. Only in such partisan and acrimonious times could these objectives be viewed as in conflict, I could tell what would follow would be disengernous, self serving an agenda driven, but I was only mostly right.

The author himself parodoxitly mentioned why such a program is a bad one. The private schools they pick are not necessarily any better than the schools they leave. Then why are they leaving? If it is just for choices sake then parents already have several that are not financed by the tax payer. They can home school their children or pay for a private school. It is a stretch to imply every child is forced to go to public school.

Furthermore these private schools that kids go to don’t have the same accountability as public schools. There teachers do not need to be certified, continue their training and there is no tool to evaluate students performance. How is the money spent too? Is everything put back into the school, or do the headmaster and board of directors have new cars each year? Sure there are great private schools but I fear when people think about private schools they only imagine Boles and Bishop Kenny not the fly by night schools in the strip malls.

When you factor in the fact that if the legislature has it’s way the expansion of vouchers will not just blur the line between church and state but erase it, the program becomes that more problematic.

Vouchers do have a place and that is a supplement to public education, something that should be given only if a private school has a program not offered by a public school that a parent believes would be beneficial. Not as a replacement for public schools and despite the author’s language this is the intended aim of the expansion of the voucher program (as well as charter schools and virtual schools).

When Doug Tuthill advocates diluting public education and siphoning off much needed resources so people can line their pockets and kids can attend schools without accountability that often perform worse than their public school counterparts he is not stepping up for kids, he is selling out kids.

This is not progress; this is a gutting of our system. The answer is to improve our public education system not dismantle it.