Scott Maxwell of the Orlando Sentinel writes here about a voucher school that is a sham, but the state doesn’t care. Does anyone in Florida care about accountability for taxpayers’ money, or about the quality of education?
I urge you to subscribe to the Orlando Sentinel to follow its fearless coverage. I did.
And remember, when you read this story, that this is what Betsy DeVos describes as the “best” state because she wants everyone to follow Florida’s example of charters, vouchers, and no accountability for public dollars.
Maxwell writes:
Two years ago, the Beta Preparatory school in Orlando was being run — with your tax dollars — inside a commercial complex on South Orange Blossom Trail, alongside eight bail-bonds businesses and a drug-testing company.
With no outdoor space for recess — and fellow tenants such as “Drug Tests R Us” — it wasn’t most parents’ vision of an ideal learning environment.
Apparently Beta wasn’t an ideal tenant either. The private school that takes state vouchers was evicted for not paying its rent.
Yes, the entire taxpayer-subsidized school. (Class, the words of the day are: “Final notice.”)
So last year, Beta moved to a new locale — a church campus in Orlando, where it continued to take more of your tax dollars … until things went south there, too.
Teachers filed formal complaints about a “lack of basic school supplies,” academic “irregularities,” student safety, inadequate staffing and a “lack of professionalism.” Multiple teachers said the school stiffed them on salary. The church said the school stiffed it on rent.
Ultimately, the school shut down for good.
You might think that would be the final chapter in this sorry story.
But not in Florida.
As Sentinel reporter Annie Martin reported last weekend, the owner of the Beta school simply opened another school a few weeks ago with a new name; this time in Volusia County … once again with your tax dollars.
Court records show the school’s owner filed the application for the new school the same week a court ordered him to pay $18,793 for not paying a teacher at his last school.
Florida education officials and politicians didn’t seem to care. They seem content to send your money — and children’s futures — down a black hole.
They scream about “accountability” for public schools, but have few checks and balances on the private schools that take public money to supposedly better serve low-income and special-needs students.
In its “Schools Without Rules” series, Sentinel reporters found voucher (or “scholarship”) schools faking safety reports, hiring felons, hiring high-school dropouts as teachers and operating in second-rate strip malls. They discovered curricula full of falsehoods and subpar lesson plans.
If you confront defenders of this system, be they legislators or school operators, many start mumbling about the virtue of “choice”— as if funding a hot mess of a school is a swell thing, as long parents choose that mess.
Horse hockey. I choose accountability. And transparency. And standards.
And the estimable Mr. Maxwell goes on to write:
Florida legislators — such as House Speaker Richard Corcoran — claim to support all those things as well.
If a tourism bureau makes headlines about questionable activities, Corcoran issues subpoenas and screams that taxpayers have a right to know how “every penny” and “every dollar” is spent. (He’s right.)
When a university is accused of improperly spending $38 million on a construction project, he demands an “immediate investigation.” (He’s right there, too.)
But as nearly a billion dollars — a mix of tax dollars and corporate tax credits — are siphoned away to voucher schools, many with proven problems, Corcoran and his buddies look the other way, meekly mumbling: Um … choice.
Mr. Speaker, you should choose to do your job.
Instead, the Sentinel’s been doing it for you. Last year, our journalists personally inspected more voucher schools in six months than every state education official combined visited in a year. And we found problems galore.
Some voucher schools whine: You’re focusing on the bad apples.
You’re damn right we are. That’s what news organizations do. We focus on problems — whether it’s dangerous airlines, corrupt toll-road agencies or, yes, shoddy schools — so we can fix them.
We’ve done it for decades at public schools — exposing safety violations, unfit teachers, absentee school board members and failing schools. And in every case, elected leaders demanded fixes.
But when problems are found at voucher schools, defenders simply whine about being picked on.
Grow up. You sound like an airline exec asking news teams not to cover a crash.
Lawmakers should require all voucher schools to hire certified teachers, or at least college grads. Schools should be inspected every year. Curriculum plans should be filed with the state. Graduation rates and nationally accepted test scores should be publicly reported. And school operators who fail shouldn’t be allowed to re open.
If you want those standards — all basic, yet none of which are in place for voucher schools — demand them from your legislator. (Contact info at http://www.leg.state.fl.us)
No decent school should be afraid of standards. If you don’t want accountability, don’t take public money.
And if you’re an elected official who doesn’t care about accountability — for all schools — find a new line of work.
Betsy has a multi-level business plan for charters and vouchers. She learned a lot from selling soap.
selling a soap pyramid scheme
Florida acts as though “choice” is a right and of primary importance. State representatives protect “choice” more than students or tax dollars. Many state representatives are invested in charters, although some of them have put their wife’s name on the actual charter documents. With little to no regulation students may be attending schools that are unsafe or even hazardous. In a neighboring county last week, two students from a special education charter school ran out of a storefront school building and were hit by a car. They both remain in critical condition.
There is little evidence that supports the value of so much “choice.” There is a lot of evidence that demonstrates that Florida’s reckless charter school policy is hurting public schools and wasting public funds. The legislature and governor refuse to regulate charters and show charters and vouchers partiality with every new law or allowable scheme. It is difficult to make positive change when conflicts of interests are ignored by the complicit leadership in Tallahassee.https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/fabiola-santiago/article151418277.html
Thanks for the link to the Miami Herald article. Jeb Bush’s legacy is clear and he is still marketing voucher schemes and private schools. It is good to see the press in Florida dismantling the claims of voucher supporters. It is too bad that the tourist and agricultural industries, along with the entire state university system is not raising the roof about the corruption.
The Newpoint jury came back with a guilty verdict for Marcus May in Pensacola. He was found guilty of fraud and racketeering, but he will not be sentenced until November.https://www.pnj.com/story/news/2018/10/04/jury-out-fraud-trial-newpoint-charter-schools-owner-marcus-may/1524926002/
The huge coordinated voucher push from ed reform is interesting, because I’m old enough to remember when they sold this to the public and we were repeatedly assured they didn’t support vouchers.
They all quietly got on board. As they always do. It’s another lockstep issue in ed reform.
Watch the next move- it will be no direct funding for public education. They’ll replace school funding with a low-value voucher- say 5k per student.
It really meets their goals- abolish labor unions and massively reduce public investment in education, thereby cutting taxes on the 1%. Again.
Each family will get 5k to bring to a private contractor and purchase educational services. For the vast majority of families this will be a massive cut – but the richest families will make out like bandits.
If you think it’s unequal now wait until they complete the privatization process. You won’t recognize what they create as anything approaching “public education”.
Today, as every day, the public are funding Betsy DeVos’ anti-public school political campaign. We’ve spent tens of millions of dollars on it since she arrived.
The federal employees travel the country and campaign against public schools, and we all pick up the tab. They bring absolutely no added value to any of the public schools they criticize, but they are very effective at convincing the public to refuse to support public education.
I wish we could pay them to stay in DC. Every public school student would benefit.
When I witness a young person doing something insightful, intelligent or brave to stand up for and help another young person in trouble, I reflexively make a guttural sound of approval and admiration. I kept making that sound reading this Sentinel article. Author! Bravo!
It should be easy to see that these schools are the educational equivalent of the paving companies that got in trouble some years ago for paving the roads with inferior product or thinning pavement in ways that assured the road would wear out quicker. That it is required of the state to have an inspector on site constantly to assure road paving is thick enough and correctly mixed is teastament to the fact that not all criminals wear masks. The problems of this type of behavior is that it threatens to undermine society itself.
In jobs like teaching, oversight on teachers takes place against the perception that all teachers bear watching. They are required to submit extravagant lesson plans that purport to show how close an administration is watching to see that the teacher is on the right “standard”. They are asked to submit to background checks that include drug tests and fingerprints (why this does not violate laws against search and seizure are beyond me). Their personal lives become the subject of social media discussion if they are members of a community. Politicians inveigh against their professional organizations and place all the burdens of society on their shoulders.
If the likes of Jeb Bush think that the creation of a double standard for charters is going to produce honesty, then they are dumber than we think. They do not think his at all, of course. Rather, they seek to create a climate in which their cronies make money. Oversight of charters is the next golden opportunity for these cronies. I cannot wait for a ” nonprofit” to emerge that is a charter school watchdog, subcontracting with the state government for millions of taxpayer dollars to assure that the charters are doing it right.
Does this indicate it is unlikely that there will be only four state attorney generals tearing apart the criminal activities of the Trump family instead of five. Will the Florida voters try and protect Trump? Or is it possible that love of vouchers still does not guarantee that one last element of democracy can still have a measure of effectiveness? There is a significant story about the activities of state atty generals in the latest New Yorker.
Florida boyers never approved vouchers.
When asked to change the state constitution to permit vouchers, they noted no, by 55-45
Voters know very little about the “opportunity scholarships.” This was Scott’s idea, I suspect, with Jeb Bush’s input. The scholarship gives wealthy taxpayers tax credits when they contribute to the “scholarships.” It is a tax write-off for the wealthy.
Vouchers were Jeb Bush’s pet project. He mentored Betsy DVos.