As a Florida parent, Laura Hine has looked long at hard at the school options available to her. And she has reached some conclusions, as she writes in this piece first published at US News.
After five years of learning from teachers, parents and administrators at our elementary school, I was elected to the Pinellas County School Board in Tampa Bay, one of the 30 largest school districts in the country with more than 90,000 students. I now serve as board chair. After years in our public schools and a lifetime of other experiences – from serving as a U.S. Naval officer deployed to the Middle East to overseeing construction of a new terminal at Tampa International Airport – I know in my bones and from the people I’ve worked with in the military and the private sector that public schools are the common fabric that binds us together as Americans.
Unfortunately, that fabric is fraying in many states today – and especially in my home state of Florida, where a “universal voucher” program was adopted two years ago. Universal vouchers allow any parents – regardless of income and regardless of their students’ needs – to receive taxpayer money for private school tuition or homeschooling. The price is staggering – it will cost our state $4.9 billion in taxpayer money this year from the Florida Tax Credit and the Florida Empowerment Scholarship. That money is being funneled to private schools and homeschoolers instead of public schools, and it’s causing a statewide budget crisis that threatens all of our public services.
Currently, more than a dozen states from Alabama to Texas have universal voucher programs. (The first-ever federal voucher program was signed into law in July by President Donald Trump.)
The ill-conceived universal “school choice” policy may be coming for your public schools soon. So it’s important to learn from Florida’s mistakes. Sunshine state taxpayers spent $1.2 billion on vouchers in 2023; that will more than quadruple to $4.9 billion in 2026, and it’s a primary reason that state planners forecast a $6.9 billion budget deficit in 2028.
Whether you support or oppose vouchers, this is the reality: The cost of vouchers to your state will require tax increases, budget cuts or both. And it’s all for a scheme that doesn’t require any proof that voucher students are doing as well as or better than their public school peers. Billions in tax dollars are being given away without performance standards and without financial accountability. In other words, universal school vouchers are giving taxpayer money to private schools that are not held to the same standards as our public schools.
There’s much more. Read the full article here.