I just discovered that I forgot to post the link to the story about the McKay Scholarship Program published by the Miami New Times, so I am reposting this entry. Gus Garcia-Roberts, the reporter who conducted this investigation of fraud in the voucher program for students with disabilities, was honored by the Society for Professional Journalists for this story.
Marcus Winters is one of those researchers who always advocates for vouchers. He often writes opinion pieces in places like the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, extolling the virtues of vouchers and private management.
In this article in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, Winters explains why New York should follow the example of Florida and give vouchers to special education students.
Winters extols Florida’s McKay Scholarship program but fails to mention that it became immersed in scandal after a Miami newspaper wrote an expose.
The schools receiving vouchers are unregulated; the state never inquires about their curriculum or their facilities.
A brief excerpt from the story in the Miami New Times:
While the state played the role of the blind sugar daddy, here is what went on at South Florida Prep, according to parents, students, teachers, and public records: Two hundred students were crammed into ever-changing school locations, including a dingy strip-mall space above a liquor store and down the hall from an Asian massage parlor. Eventually, fire marshals and sheriffs condemned the “campus” as unfit for habitation, pushing the student body into transience in church foyers and public parks.
The teachers were mostly in their early 20s. An afternoon for the high school students might consist of watching a VHS tape of a 1976Laurence Fishburne blaxploitation flick —Cornbread, Earl and Me — and then summarizing the plot. In one class session, a middle school teacher recommended putting “mother nature” — a woman’s period — into spaghetti sauce to keep a husband under thumb. “We had no materials,” says Nicolas Norris, who taught music despite the lack of a single instrument. “There were no teacher edition books. There was no curriculum.”
In May 2009, two vanloads of South Florida Prep kids were on the way back from a field trip to Orlando when one of the vehicles flipped along Florida’s Turnpike. A teacher and an 18-year-old senior were killed. Turns out another student, age 17 and possessing only a learner’s permit, was behind the wheel and had fallen asleep. The families of the deceased and an insurance company are suing Brown for negligence.
Meanwhile, Brown openly used a form of corporal punishment that has been banned in Miami-Dade and Broward schools for three decades. Four former students and the music teacher Norris recall that the principal frequently paddled students for misbehaving. In a complaint filed with the DOE in April 2009, one parent rushed to the school to stop Brown from taking a paddle to her son’s behind.
The reporter described the McKay Scholarship program as: “…a perverse science experiment, using disabled school kids as lab rats and funded by nine figures in taxpayer cash: Dole out millions to anybody calling himself an educator. Don’t regulate curriculum or even visit campuses to see where the money is going. For optimal results, do this in Florida, America’s fraud capital.”
The program has doled out over $1 billion in public funds to more than 1,000 schools. What does deregulation mean? “There is no accreditation requirement for McKay schools. And without curriculum regulations, the DOE can’t yank back its money if students are discovered to be spending their days filling out workbooks, watching B-movies, or frolicking in the park. In one “business management” class, students shook cans for coins on street corners.”
Because the schools are private — although accepting publicly funded vouchers — the DOE is not allowed to monitor curriculum. For the same reason, the department claims it can’t bar corporal punishment, despite parents’ complaints that children are being paddled.
Marcus Winters’ colleague Jay Greene at the University of Arkansas defended the McKay Scholarship program by pointing to an anecdote about a child in a public school special-education program in Alabama who was maltreated. Greene disparaged the publication, implying that it is an untrustworthy source, not to be taken seriously. But the writer of the story, Gus Garcia-Roberts was honored by the Society of Professional Journalists, which named him as first-place winner of its Sigma Delta Chi award for public service journalism for a reporter at a non-daily publication.
Unlike Greene’s defense of the McKay Scholarships, the story in the Miami New Times was not an anecdote about the mistreatment of one child. It was a story about a system in which many children are mistreated, the result of a two-month investigation into a state-funded program that has no standards for the schools that receive the state’s most vulnerable children.
Six months after the original story, the newspaper wrote a follow-up. Florida legislators, including sponsors of the vouchers for special education, have vowed to reform the program. “Sen. Stephen Wise, a Jacksonville Republican who originally co-sponsored the program, declared our findings “appalling… I’m amazed that there’s not more scrutiny about where the money is going.” The program’s progenitor, former Florida Senate President McKay, a Republican from Bradenton, concluded: “Somebody better get off their ass and fix those problems.”
Meanwhile, New York legislators need to do something to reform the state’s privatized program of special education for preschoolers. Just weeks ago, the New York Times published an expose about the fraud and corruption in that expensive, scandal-ridden boondoggle.
Wow! Unregulated privateers who would destroy kids for a profit. That is sick!
Oh, but I’m sure they mean so well.
So well to line their own pockets.
Bastards.
Absolutely no conscience.
I can’t help but wonder who would work for such a “school.” even the most green, callow, inexperienced teacher would be able to tell that the circumstances described in the article are egregious.
I don’t know much about it but Ohio has had an Autism Scholarship program for a number of years now. As far as I can tell, is a voucher program by another name: families are given $20,000 to pretty much spend as they see fit and independent autism “schools” have sprung up across the state to scoop up this money.
From the point of view of the people who set up the Scholarship program, I guess it is a success because it appears to have attracted next to no attention from anyone who might be in a position to evaluate its results. Anyway, I think there is a big newspaper expose or a doctoral dissertation waiting there.
I have to say vouchers for special education would have helped my hearing impaired son attend a private accredited school in Missouri. What do you do as a parent living in a public system that teaches a mode of communication that your child does not want to learn? My son was oral (although he was severe/profoundly deaf) but was EXPECTED to sign. He was in a “total communication” classroom that was supposed to teach deaf students to talk, but it never happened in this district. The truth was, the teachers didn’t know how to accomplish this goal. IEPs were just “fill in the blank”….and all the “blanks” were the same for each child. We parents compared them and shock of all shocks, they were all the same.
We found a private school and enrolled our son. We requested (via due process) the school district to pay for the private tuition (the district could have made money on the deal as it was funded at a rate higher than the private tuition) so he could learn in his most “appropriate” manner, but it refused. We ultimately lost the due process but won the battle…our son is successful today and I totally chalk that up to the intensive 5 year private schooling he received.
Would I have welcomed vouchers so we, the parents, could secure an appropriate education for our child in this private school? YES. It still irks me we were in an educational box in our Kansas public school district that did not address the needs of our child and we had to pay the taxes for this education that was substandard. We had to pay not only for the substandard public education system but also for the private school tuition. The dirty secret that administrators and teachers won’t tell you is…THE SYSTEM PROTECTS THE SYSTEM.
The quandary is the control the government would/should yield over private schools. It IS taxpayer money used for vouchers so there should be some accountability. But to which group? The public education bureaucratic system? It tends to want to get rid of special education students because they are expensive to educate. It doesn’t want to deal with these students. Bill Gates and the ed reformers? They could care less about this population of students. They don’t fit well into the workforce data set parameters. Parents should be able to decide whether or not the public school is working for their child or not meeting the child’s needs. But parents are not the “stakeholders” these educational bureaucrats and gurus want to hear from. I should note that in our court hearing the teachers testified that if our son (at 6 years old) learned his “ABC’s” in one year, they would consider that an “appropriate” education. And the judge agreed. Oh, the wonder of low expectations.
Unless you have been in that situation of inappropriate education offered to your child, and that’s the only option offered, it is difficult to understand the parents’ desperation to get out of that school and find other alternatives. The deeper issue, in my opinion, is that the taxpayers and the districts cannot make decisions defying Federal mandates that will cost the district money. Many parents think that if their children go to charters or schools funded by vouchers those schools will be “different”, but in my state, they still operate under common core standards. The delivery will be different with different players, but the content will be the same. This story reminds me of school officials washing their hands of these students. Autonomy doesn’t exist at the local or state level much anymore so this lack of oversight and disinterest isn’t surprising.
A wise mother told me as we were starting on this journey: “Everybody is out to make money on your child. You and your husband, as parents, must determine who will give him the best education and shot at independence (as opposed to being caught up in the support system forever) and go with that provider”.
Sad to say, but the public schools are like the VA Hospital or other governmental programs. They will offer a product and if it works for you, fine. It not, you better have the resources and fortitude to seek private or home school. The public educational system could care less about your student as an individual…as a subgroup he/she is valuable for statistics and federal funding, but real learning is secondary. Until local communities and parents have a say in the schools they fund, I don’t think it will get any better. Vouchers as they are structured today, at least in my state, don’t give parents any real “choice”, just an illusion of “choice” wrapped in the same mandates as traditional public schools.
I agree vouchers in this article were used poorly. I am furious at the educational corporate piranhas operating schools funded by taxpayer dollars just to make a profit and not provide real education. I don’t know what the answer is. The public schools are a testament to failed Federal policies and so are the current alternatives put forth by Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, Jeb Bush, David Coleman, etc.
Does anyone have an idea (other than enacting new laws, regulations and mandates) to make sure educators and corporatist ed reformers provide all children an appropriate education?
Unbelievably sickening.
Isn’t this fraud? What you have described in this blog should never happen to any child anywhere in the world. The unregulated “privateers” who subject children to this unprotected status should all be in jail. Citizens must regain local control of their schools. They must stop state government from following the federal government, and above all privatizing MUST be stopped immediately. Citizens must demand a complete investigation from local law officials. Investigate the state officials who have a vested finiancial interest in all the schools that are now being turned over to outside interest. Citizens can act through a petition to all involved. Seek help from any, and all, groups possible. Organize and hand out fliers to as many citizens as possible. Most of the news media and politicians appear to be in the pocket of corporate interest, so act on your own. Gather the facts and expose the vested interest to other citizens. This type of privateering strips all citizens of representaton. This is destructive to our representative principles and is actually taxations without representation. If citizens don’t care about child abuse, then they may possible care about higher taxes being paid to these privateers. If there is a will, there is a way!
This is no surprise to anyone, the DOE doesn’t want to know, it is just a peek behind the curtain of
“school choice”, charters and public school “reform”. If these perverse day-camps for challenging students can get funded with tax payer dollars, then why not fully fund the real schools and the real teachers who have the background and professionalism to do it right? I can answer that one: Because there is profit to be made doing it the sneaky way. Public $ means accountability FOR ALL, or accountability FOR NONE.
Nobody can be worse than people who spoil the future of others just for money. This is disheartening and sick.