Once-subversive plot to dismantle traditional public schools in Florida now central policy

Diverting taxpayer dollars to private, and often religious, schools used to be a wacky, unconstitutional subversion of public education in Florida. 

Former Gov. Jeb Bush was one of the pioneers of privatizing public education. Like most bad ideas, it started out small.

The Opportunity Scholarship Program was set up to fund private tuitions for just 730 former public-school students. But it didn’t get very far. The Florida Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 2006.

"It diverts public dollars into separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools that are the sole means set out in the Constitution for the state to provide for the education of Florida's children," the state's high court wrote.

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Playing the long game on school vouchers

That should have been the end of it. But entrepreneurs, religious organizations and home-schoolers looking to tap into public education dollars found allies with Republican lawmakers eager to dismantle and starve public schools and their unions. 

So, they never gave up. The state Constitution became a minor detail to sidestep, and with the Florida and U.S. Supreme Courts transitioning to a captured, fully-compliant enabler of the party’s wildest dreams, we’re now seeing Jeb Bush’s secret plan being shouted boldly in the open.

Last summer, the U.S. Supreme Court, on a 6-3 decision in the case Carson v. Makin, tore down the once-solid wall of church-state separation by deciding that if a state funds vouchers for private schools, it must also include vouchers for religious schools.

This month, the Florida Legislature began pushing a bill (HB 1) aimed at making most of Florida’s 2.8 million public school students eligible for vouchers that would, in effect, defund traditional public schools for a patchwork of alternatives — private, religious, or home schools — that lack state oversight for teacher certification, academic and testing requirements, and other accountability standards traditional public schools face.

(Some of these private Christian schools that get taxpayer dollars use textbooks that dispute evolution and teach that humans and dinosaurs lived together on Earth.)

“I think it’s clear to us that nobody, absolutely nobody knows the abilities and needs of their child better than a parent,” said Rep. Kaylee Tuck, R-Lake Placid, a sponsor of the legislation. “HB 1 will empower every parent to be able to choose the customized and tailored education system that fits best for their students.”

The bill is being cheered on by the nation’s biggest enemies of traditional public schools, including former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Amway heiress and voucher proponent who home-schooled her own children.

DeVos signed onto a letter from a coalition of voucher pushers across the country urging Florida to fund students, not schools.

"In the interest of students in Florida and across the country, we urge Florida’s lawmakers to adopt these policies, to further empower parents and expand school choice, and set the roadmap for an education system to benefit the Free State of Florida," the Educational Freedom Institute said.

The Education Freedom Institute’s website contains a piece by two of its fellows that urges Republicans to engage in culture wars to promote vouchers. Making attacks against public schools by criticizing the teaching of Black history, COVID-19 mask policy, books available in school libraries, and the so-called “woke” mindset of public schools on LGBT issues will help drive parents toward educational alternatives, it says.

“The school choice movement should adopt new tactics not only on policy design but also with respect to messaging,” their piece says. “On policy, this means developing universal programs with large scholarship amounts and few regulatory constraints. On messaging, this means promoting choice to parents who are concerned about political activism and other so-called social justice trends in neighborhood schools. 

“It is time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture war.”

Money laundering education dollars in Florida

The enemies of public education in Florida have had a long history of deceit. 

To sidestep the 2006 Florida Supreme Court ruling on vouchers, the state’s lawmakers engaged in a kind of money-laundering scheme with a company organized as a charity.

Cut off from using tax collections from the general fund to directly pay private schools, Florida lawmakers allowed corporations to pay their taxes as “donations” to a private company, Step Up for Students, which would then give “scholarships” (vouchers) to individual students for their private school tuition.

By passing the tax money through the company, which skimmed off 3 percent for administrative fees, the state’s Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program became the metaphorical camel’s nose under the tent.

Doug Tuthill, the founding head of Step Up for Students, couldn't help bragging about what he had created in Florida when speaking in 2011 to a California symposium on the importance of faith-based schools in the school-choice movement.

"Because the Republican Party is fairly solid on our issue, most of the money we're spending is in Democratic primaries," Tuthill said. "I'd like to say that people do it because it's the right thing to do but that $1 million every other cycle gets people's attention."

Tuthill said the goal in Florida was vouchers for all but his group had to make its pitch about helping poor kids. 

 "In a world of finite resources, we focus our resources as a tactical priority on the high-poverty family," he said at that symposium. "That's another reason why we've been very, very successful, is because we make low-income families the face of the program.

"It's all about parental empowerment, and here's the face," he said. "An overwhelming majority of the folks in our program are Democrats. ... We put those people in the face of Democrats and say, 'How can you deny this parent the right to educate their child in the way that they need?' 

“That and the money has gone a long way to creating this cognitive dissonance among Democrats."

The idea that kids would be better off in some unregulated private school that stays in business by collecting voucher money is far from the truth. The state is littered with failed private schools that then dump their students back into the public system.

For example, this month, parents taking their children to the private Allapattah Wynwood School in Miami-Dade were furious to find the school suddenly shut down due to a legal battle going on among the family that founded the school. 

Herbert Fonseca Jr., the son of the school’s owner, was an assistant principal at the school before he was fired last month — a move he said was attributed to his father’s declining mental condition and bad advice.

“It really hurts me,” the son told WPLG Channel-10 news. “It’s emotional for me to see these kids displaced like that over some nonsense.”

Parents were left scrambling, trying to enroll their kids in traditional public schools, but unable to get student records from the suddenly shuttered private school.  Some parents protested outside in front of the school with signs that read "Open the school please" and "What happened to the school?"

For years, observers have been watching Florida’s relentless efforts to outsource public education through the promotion of vouchers.

 Andrew Coulson, the former director of the Cato Institute's Center of Educational Freedom, predicted 12 years ago that a “domino effect” for vouchers would happen in Florida.

"If you have 300,000 kids in a single state in private schools, thanks to a school-choice program, you're eventually going to have everybody in that state in a school-choice program, because the parents who aren't eligible for it will demand the ability to participate," Coulson had said.

It seems that we are racing toward that day. No need to be sneaky about it anymore.

The camel's in the tent.

Frank Cerabino is a columnist at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at fcerabino@gannett.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.