Scott Maxwell of the Sun-Sentinel in Orlando calls out state education officials for their double standards. Public schools give state tests and are held accountable for student performance. Private voucher schools are not required to give the tests, and few do. Public schools are required to hire teachers who are detified to teach. Voucher schools can hire anyone, even “teachers” without a college degree. Public schools are not allowed to discriminate against students with disabilities or students who are gay. Voucher schools discriminate against any students they don’t want.

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By SCOTT MAXWELL | smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com | Orlando Sentinel

Florida’s new top education official is pretty unpopular these days.

Last week, Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas was booed by local school officials from around the state.

Keep in mind: This wasn’t a room full of lefty liberals. It was a gathering of school board members from across the state — the majority of whom represent rural, Republican counties.

But even conservative leaders have quickly tired of an education official whose top priority seems to be trashing public education.

In fact, that seems to be why Gov. Ron DeSantis picked his 37-year-old former deputy chief of staff for the post — to trash teachers, threaten schools and generally troll public education. It’s like putting a guy who hates puppies in charge of an animal shelter.

Still, big talkers often clam up when pushed to address the facts beyond their cheap shots. And that has been the case here. Kamoutsas loves to claim that public schools are “failing,” but seems thoroughly uninterested in talking about how many voucher and charter schools have been proven disasters.

After all, it has become abundantly clear that Florida’s multi-billion-dollar experiment in school choice has failed a lot of kids. The Orlando Sentinel has documented many examples in its “Schools Without Rules” investigation into voucher (or “scholarship”) schools.

All of it funded by taxpayers. All of it documented in print. Yet most of those school operators didn’t get threats from state officials. They just got more public money.

Some schools were such financial disasters, they shut down in the middle of the year, leaving families stranded. (We found one in Orlando that was evicted from a commercial complex where the neighboring tenants included a place called “Drug Tests R Us.” More recently, a South Florida TV station reported that a voucher school in Fort Pierce closed its doors one weekend in September, “leaving parents scrambling for alternatives.”)

We also found schools that employed “teachers” without teaching credentials or college degrees.

Hundreds also had written policies of discrimination, saying they refused to serve students with autism, in wheelchairs, who are gay or who have LGBTQ parents.

Florida voucher schools fail, stiff teachers — and get more money to try again

So after Kamoutsas threatened to shut down public schools in the name of “accountability,” I asked him why he hadn’t pushed for accountability for all voucher schools as well.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Kamoutsas didn’t respond to that question. Neither did his press office. Suddenly, all the tough talk stopped.

And those messes at taxpayer-funded voucher schools are just the tip of Florida’s increasingly messy school-choice iceberg. Florida’s network of voucher and charter schools keep making national headlines for new problems.

Just last week, the state’s own auditors concluded that Florida’s publicly funded voucher program was such a financial mess that the state couldn’t account for hundreds of millions of tax dollars.

Then there was a report from CBS News that said a startup charter school connected to Erika Donalds, the wife of GOP gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds, had enrolled students, only to never open its doors.

Where’s the accountability for that?

A handful of GOP leaders have spoken up. Veteran Republican State Sen. Don Gaetz called for more accountability for voucher money after declaring: “Whatever can go wrong with this system has gone wrong.” And Lt. Gov. Jay Collins tweeted that law enforcement should perhaps probe the “financial irregularities” at the Donalds-connected school.

But Gaetz received pushback. And Erika Donalds said that Collins was only spotlighting problems at her schools because Collins is contemplating an uphill gubernatorial battle against her husband. The reality is that Republican leaders in this state have never pushed for serious accountability for taxpayer-funded schools of choice.

Even after Florida journalists exposed schools that shut down mid-year, hired teachers without degrees or discriminated against students with disabilities, nothing was done. All we heard was more trash talk about public schools and teachers.

Discrimination: Florida voucher schools can reject kids with disabilities | Commentary

Some choice schools do stellar jobs. I’ve been a big advocate for charter schools like UCP of Central Florida that specialize in teaching kids with special needs and do so in caring, effective fashion. And some private schools that accept vouchers are among the best in the state.

But there are also some total dumpster fires. That’s why people who truly believe in accountability believe it should apply to all schools that get public money.

I do. So does the Orlando Sentinel at large. Over the years, this newspaper exposed many problems at public schools — everything from safety violations and poor test scores to unfit teachers and absentee school board members. Usually, public officials agreed that reform and accountability was needed.

Yet most every time we’ve exposed problems in taxpayer-funded voucher schools over the past decade, state lawmakers and education leaders looked the other way.

There are some basic measures that should be in place to protect both students and taxpayers.

Voucher schools, for instance, should be required to publish graduation rates and nationally accepted test scores, hire teachers who are certified or at least have a college degree, disclose all their curriculum, end their discrimination policies and prove that they have their finances in sound enough order to remain open for an entire school year. This is all really basic stuff.

The bottom line: If Kamoutsas and other state officials truly believe in accountability, they’d demand it for all taxpayer-funded schools. And for all the students who attend them.