The notion of providing parents with a universal voucher to attend the private school of their choice has its roots in the free market economic theory first promoted by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School in the 1950s. The very act of parents making a choice drives competition in the marketplace which in turn grows the market share and profits resulting in a better product (education). Supporters assert that vouchers provide a quick way out of struggling schools for low-income students.

A voucher is a publicly-funded K-12 scholarship to be used by parents without restriction toward tuition at the school of their choice. Vouchers are not intended to cover the entire cost of private tuition. It is expected that if parents make that “choice” they will pay the balance owed to the private school.

No one wants children to stagnate in under-performing schools, whether they are public or private. It’s ironic that many Florida parents who use the Corporate Tax Credit Voucher, to leave their failing D or F schools, are not aware that private school they choose is not any better than the public school they are leaving.

In 1999, former Governor Jeb Bush succeeded in making Florida the first state in the nation to adopt a statewide universal voucher program. Controversial from the start, Bush’s voucher system transferred taxpayer dollars meant for traditional public schools into the coffers of private, often expensive religious schools.

After protracted court proceedings, the Florida Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Florida Opportunity Scholarship Program, a universal voucher program, violated Article IX, section 1 of the Florida Constitution: “Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, safe, secure and high-quality system of free public schools. —source

Disappointment over the court’s ruling was so profound that it inspired Governor Bush’s attorney, Clark Neily , of the Institute for Justice to write “The Florida Supreme Court v. School Choice – A “Uniformly” Horrid Decision” to express his disappointment. The mission of Neily and the non-profit Institute for Justice is to litigate four core areas: economic liberty, property rights, free speech and school choice. —source

Following this bitter defeat, Governor Bush and the Florida Legislature created two other voucher programs. Both programs have been the subject of fraud and scandal as neither is accredited, regulated or accountable for performance or standards imposed on traditional public schools.

Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship Voucher – operates much like the Opportunity Scholarship Program did with the important distinction of diverting corporate taxes into a private entity called a Scholarship Funding Organization. There are four of these in Florida: Step Up For Students, The Carrie Meek Foundation, Lightbearers, Inc. and Educate Today.

Paying the Scholarship Funding Organization allows corporations to bypass state coffers and divert funds to remain “private.” During 2009-10, scholarships of $106 M were awarded to 28,927 students enrolled in 1,033 private schools. In 2010-11 scholarships topped the $140 M cap set by the legislature.

After the 2011 Legislative session, Governor Scott signed HB 965 into law eliminating the 75% cap on the amount that may be contributed in lieu of paying corporate taxes directly to the state. The credits apply to corporate income taxes, insurance premium taxes, severance taxes on oil and gas production, self-accrued sales tax liabilities of direct pay permit holders and taxes on beer, wine and alcoholic beverages.

Governor Scott also signed HB 1331, Expanded School Choice options. This law expands the definition of a failing school so that more students will be eligible for the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which is why the caps had to be lifted by HB 965. The law changes the definition of failing to a school that receives a “D” or and “F”, in the prior year instead of receiving two “F”s in a four year period.

John McKay Scholarship for Students with Disabilities Program is Florida’s second voucher plan. As of 2009-10, $138.7M had been paid to scholarship recipients in amounts ranging from $4,746 to $19,133, with the average amount being $7,144. The program serviced 20,926 students in 959 private schools.

The McKay Vouchers were significantly expanded when the 2011 Legislature passed HB 1329 which will now include students who have been issued a 504 Accommodation Plan under the American Disabilities Act. The amount of scholarship paid to private schools will equal the amount formerly paid to the district for that student under the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP).

Voucher advocates are unfazed. They no longer claim that vouchers will close the achievement gap or produce miraculous academic gains for poor and minority students. Instead, they now say that choice will increase parental involvement or that choice is a good in itself or that choice will save money. That last argument is the one that really moves policymakers in these tough fiscal times.

Imagine that: voucher schools may not educate kids better, but they can do the job at half the cost. That’s powerful, and it reveals what matters most these days: not improving education, not encouraging creativity and innovation, but cutting costs.

Source: Diane Ravitch, Vouchers Make A Comeback, But Why?. Bridging Differences, EdWeek, April 12, 2011, http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2011/04/vouchers_make_a_comeback_but_w.html

I’m confident that it’s highly unlikely that we’re going to see huge differential positive test score gains from this program” or negative results either, he said after the report was released Monday. “My hunch is, when all is said and done … it’s going to be a wash in terms of test scores.

— Source: David Figlio, School Vouchers Study Finds Little Difference Between Public Schools, St. Petersburg Times; June 30, 2009

The short answer is no. Students who use corporate tax dollars to attend private schools that lack accreditation, accountability and standards do not out-perform their counterparts in traditional public schools.

The state of Florida commissioned David Figlio, a Faculty Fellow at the Institute of Policy Research, Northwestern University to do a series of 4 studies to determine whether students perform better after leaving their “F” traditional public school to participate in Florida’s Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship program.

Figlio’s third study, Evaluation of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program Participation, Compliance, Test Scores and Parental Satisfaction in 2008-09, reveals great difficulty in attributing any test score gains to vouchers. He began by comparing test scores of students in the voucher program, which served 23,259 students last year, to eligible public school students who opted not to participate.

Since private schools are not required to do any specific testing and the FCAT is not norm referenced, finding common ground was not easy. Any test that the voucher students might take, like the Stanford is norm-referenced. By choosing not to impose any standards on private schools, Florida legislators significantly hampered Figlio’s ability to understand the academic performance of the voucher students.

Although qualifying for free or reduced lunch is a key factor that makes a student eligible for a voucher, Figlio spends a great deal of time in the report trying to discern any economic differences that might exist between a free or reduced lunch voucher user and a non-participating student who attends a traditional public school as a free or reduced lunch recipient.

An overlay chart on page 26 of the report shows nearly identical testing results between voucher schools and traditional public schools among the lowest performing students. Figlio writes:

In summary, the regression discontinuity model suggests that there is no discernible difference between FTC Scholarship Program participants and nonparticipants in terms of reading test score gains, and there may be modest positive effects of participation for mathematics gains. These differences, however, are still small in magnitude, are within the range of potential errors in the concordance analysis, and are not statistically significant at conventional levels, so they should be not be interpreted as strongly favorable, only potentially suggestive.

Therefore, the best interpretation of the findings of no substantial difference between FTC Scholarship Program? participants and nonparticipants in the public schools is that students who have transferred to the private sector using a FTC Scholarship appear to be keeping pace with the gains observed in the public sector.

— Source: David Figlio and Cassandra Hart, “Competitive Effects of Means-Tested School Vouchers,” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper #16056, June 2010, http://www.nber.org/papers/w16056

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been diverted during the past decade away from Florida public schools in the belief that the private sector would accomplish what some admittedly poor performing traditional schools could not. Unfortunately, there are no significant gains for students attending these schools. Instead of properly tackling the problem within the system, the state of Florida and its politicians turned these struggling students and their future over to a deregulated, unproven experiment that plowed taxpayer millions into the real winners: private religious schools.

The best conclusion that Figlio was able to draw from his research was this: It does not matter whether private schools who accept vouchers are better than traditional public schools. What matters is that the parents got to make a choice.

As can be seen, parents of students participating in the program are highly satisfied, relative to other families. This is not causal evidence as there are many reasons why a family would choose to participate in the program or to select a private school, but it does provide some suggestive evidence about the perceptions of parents regarding their children’s schools. These results are consistent with other survey data in Florida and elsewhere suggesting that parents tend to be very happy with the choices they made in voucher and scholarship programs.

We also investigate whether families with different backgrounds had different reactions to their children’s schools in March of the 2008-09 school year. Specifically, we stratify families based on race and ethnicity (white, black and Hispanic) and based on the respondent’s level of education (college graduate, some college or postsecondary education, or a high school degree or less.) In the figure below, we present the percentage of respondents of each type who rated their child’s school as “excellent” or “good.” As can be seen, participants across the considered dimensions rate their children’s schools very highly. Minorities and less- educated households appear to be relatively unhappy with their children’s schools when the children are not participating in the program. In summary, while readers should interpret these survey results cautiously, they do provide a fuller picture of the potential effects of participating in the FTC Scholarship Program for families that applied to participate. — Source: Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program Participation, Compliance, Test Scores and Parental Satisfaction in 2008-09, pages 39-40.

In the final analysis, Figlio’s work indicates that it does not matter whether the private schools who accept voucher money are better than traditional public schools. What mattered was that the parents made a choice to use their voucher money to send their student to a particular school. In addition, without the voucher only 5% of the students would have attended a private school and 80% of the schools chosen were religious in nature.

Voucher supporters, comfortable that private schools do not deliver greater learning gains or test scores than their traditional counterparts, claim that vouchers are cheaper and better for business. Are they?

In 2011, a voucher is worth $4,106 – 60% of the $6,843 averaged FTE allotted students attending traditional public school.

Since the Florida Constitution stipulates that the state must provide a high-quality public education, traditional public schools must:

• Teach every student who walks in the door
• Maintain class size requirements
• Teachers and schools must be fully licensed and accredited
• Provide services and special instruction to those in need,
• Adhere to curriculum standards
• Issue and teach to standardized tests
• Offer libraries and technology for research and learning
• Furnish play grounds and
• Provide standardized PE equipment and playing fields
• Provide safe transportation
• Ensure safety, uniformity and efficiency
• Must be free of charge
• Must feed children who cannot pay for lunch
• May not discriminate on the basis of religion, race or ideology

Florida private schools are:

• Not regulated – caveat emptor – buyer beware
• Not required to ter Fellow tackling the prps