RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Florida Court Strikes Down School Vouchers

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^{By BILL KACZOR, AP}

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (Jan. 6) - The Florida Supreme Court struck down a statewide voucher system Thursday that allowed children to attend private schools at taxpayer expense - a program Gov. Jeb Bush considered one of his proudest achievements.

It was the nation's first statewide voucher program.

In a 5-2 ruling, the high court said the program undermines the public schools and violates the Florida Constitution's requirement of a uniform system of free public education.

Voucher opponents had also argued that the program violated the separation of church and state in giving tax dollars to parochial schools - an argument a lower court agreed with. But the state Supreme Court did not address that issue.

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The fundys lose again!

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Wednesday said:
This discussion quickly went down the political road.

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thedoctor said:
Heh! The graduate student in my office is from Florida, and she's told me how the program has actually improved public schools by creating a need for them to get their shit straight or losing students and funds. Let's see where this leads them.

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the G-man said:

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Wednesday said:
This discussion quickly went down the political road.

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It was already there, with the intial post about how this was nothing so much but a loss for the religious right ("fundys").

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You both sound so surprised. Tragicjay strikes again!

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Wednesday said:
This discussion quickly went down the political road.

The reason the voucher plan has been halted for now is because there are no more failing schools in Florida. Under the voucher plan, many of the students zoned for schools that had failed the FCAT were given vouchers allowing them to attend nearby private schools, expenses paid. Now that there are no such schools, there will be no such vouchers.

Well, actually, some kids will still receive vouchers: about 50 kids in Pensacola and a limited number of disabled children whose public schools do not meet their needs.

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The reason it's been halted forever is that it was ruled unconstitutional! Do I take delight in the preservation of the First Amendment? You're damned right I do!

For "Stupid in America," a special report ABC will air Friday, we gave identical tests to high school students in New Jersey and in Belgium. The Belgian kids cleaned the American kids' clocks. The Belgian kids called the American students "stupid."

We didn't pick smart kids to test in Europe and dumb kids in the United States. The American students attend an above-average school in New Jersey, and New Jersey's kids have test scores that are above average for America.

The American boy who got the highest score told me: "I'm shocked, 'cause it just shows how advanced they are compared to us."

The Belgians did better because their schools are better. At age ten, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age fifteen, when students from forty countries are tested, the Americans place twenty-fifth. The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from countries that spend much less money on education.

This should come as no surprise once you remember that public education in the USA is a government monopoly. Don't like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it's good or bad. That's why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.

In New York City, it's "just about impossible" to fire a bad teacher, says schools chancellor Joel Klein. The new union contract offers slight relief, but it's still about 200 pages of bureaucracy. "We tolerate mediocrity," said Klein, because "people get paid the same, whether they're outstanding, average, or way below average." One teacher sent sexually oriented emails to "Cutie 101," his sixteen year old student. Klein couldn't fire him for years, "He hasn't taught, but we have had to pay him, because that's what's required under the contract."

They've paid him more than $300,000, and only after 6 years of litigation were they able to fire him. Klein employs dozens of teachers who he's afraid to let near the kids, so he has them sit in what they call "rubber rooms." This year he will spend twenty million dollars to warehouse teachers in five rubber rooms. It's an alternative to firing them. In the last four years, only two teachers out of 80,000 were fired for incompetence.

When I confronted Union president Randi Weingarten about that, she said, "they [the NYC school board] just don't want to do the work that's entailed." But the "work that's entailed" is so onerous that most principals just give up, or get bad teachers to transfer to another school. They even have a name for it: "the dance of the lemons."

The inability to fire the bad and reward the good is the biggest reason schools fail the kids. Lack of money is often cited the reason schools fail, but America doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years. Test scores and graduation rates stayed flat. New York City now spends an extraordinary $11,000 per student. That's $220,000 for a classroom of twenty kids. Couldn't you hire two or three excellent teachers and do a better job with $220,000?

Only a monopoly can spend that much money and still fail the kids.

The U.S. Postal Service couldn't get it there overnight. But once others were allowed to compete, Federal Express, United Parcel, and others suddenly could get it there overnight. Now even the post office does it (sometimes). Competition inspires people to do what we didn't think we could do.

If people got to choose their kids' school, education options would be endless. There could soon be technology schools, cheap Wal-Mart-like schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows? If there were competition, all kinds of new ideas would bloom.

This already happens overseas. In Belgium, for example, the government funds education—at any school—but if the school can't attract students, it goes out of business. Belgian school principal Kaat Vandensavel told us she works hard to impress parents. "If we don't offer them what they want for their child, they won't come to our school." She constantly improves the teaching, "You can't afford ten teachers out of 160 that don't do their work, because the clients will know, and won't come to you again."

"That's normal in Western Europe," Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby told me. "If schools don't perform well, a parent would never be trapped in that school in the same way you could be trapped in the U.S."

Last week, Florida's Supreme Court shut down "opportunity scholarships," Florida's small attempt at competition. Public money can't be spent on private schools, said the court, because the state constitution commands the funding only of "uniform, . . . high-quality" schools. But government schools are neither uniform nor high-quality, and without competition, no new teaching plan or No Child Left Behind law will get the monopoly to serve its customers well.

A Gallup Poll survey shows 76 percent of Americans are either completely or somewhat satisfied with their kids' public school, but that's only because they don't know what their kids are missing. Without competition, unlike Belgian parents, they don't know what their kids might have had.

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Matter-eater Man said:
I guess I just never understood how taking money away from a school via the vouchers actually helps public schools. The familys that have their kids in private schools don't give a crap about public schools. The private schools also don't have to take costly special needs kids. Vouchers have been around for decades, have our schools improved or become worse?

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wannabuyamonkey said:
Last question first; In teh areas where vouchers have been implimented shools have improved. If I could provide teh data to prove that would it effect your view in any way?

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As far as "taking the money away" from public schools, teh money is a refund to the tax payer, a parrent who decides to take thier child out of a failing shool shouldn't have to also pay for that school to contnue to fail... the way that it improves schools is by providing something that has proven to improve quality in all areas.... compitition.

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...As far as "taking the money away" from public schools, teh money is a refund to the tax payer,...

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Matter-eater Man said:

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...As far as "taking the money away" from public schools, teh money is a refund to the tax payer,...

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I forgot to address this WBAM. How is it a refund? Keep in mind there are many of us who don't or won't ever have children using the public or private schools.

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Many parents would choose a private school for purely religous reasons.

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...Well, In many cases schools teach that abstinace is futile and encourage kids to experience as long as they're safe.

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First you require me to pay for the school that goes beyond educating my child about the facts and teaching them morals as you see them, then you force my child, if I have one, to attend the school (education is comulsory in most states) so why wouldn't many parrents want to put thier children in a school that reinforced thier world-view rather than undermined it? I can assure you that if the atmosphere in public schools wasn't becoming more hostile towards specific religions then the adherants to said religions wouldn't feel as compelled to seek alternitives, of coarse anotehr way to solve the problem would be to simply eliminate any alternitives... wich seems to be the prefered direction for some.

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I'm looking at your response & see somebody who I doubt would ever support any funding towards public schooling unless his kids had to use it. Not a good way to convince people that vouchers are the best thing for the country.

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