Writing for the Florida Policy Institute, Esteban Leonardo Santis explains that federal school vouchers would not serve public school students.
Florida has lessons to offer about vouchers. Congress should learn from the state as the cautionary tale that it is and act to preserve and support public education for all students by rejecting the House’s proposal.
Beginning in the FY 2023-24 school year, vouchers were made available to all Florida students eligible to attend public school, regardless of income. Proponents touted the program as a remedy for students in underperforming schools that allows money to follow the child from public schools to private schools. However, in Florida, 69 percent of new voucher applicants are students who were never in public schools. The money cannot follow these students to private schools, because they were never there to begin with. Home-school and private school vouchers drain funding from public education for the overwhelming majority of students that choose public schools.
Like Florida’s voucher program before the expansion to universal eligibility, the House bill includes an accelerator clause, which would allow the amount of tax credits awarded to increase by 5 percent per year if 90 percent of funds were awarded in the preceding year. The federal bill states that the amount could never be less than the previous year’s allocation.
Also like Florida’s program, under the House bill, there would be little or no accountability for student outcomes or return on investment. Voucher students are not required to take the same standardized testing as public school students and so outcomes cannot be compared directly. Private schools in Florida are not required to be accredited, and the qualifications of teachers described in the federal proposal are nearly identical to those in Florida statute that allows “subject matter experts” to be teachers rather than certified instructors. The lack of transparency around expenditures of education savings accounts creates potential for fraud and abuse, which in Florida has resulted in purchases of theme park tickets, kayaks, and big screen televisions.
Read more (guess who would benefit from the federal vouchers) here.