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January 13, 2006
Florida voucher program decisions: Why stop at just one?This Orlando Sentinel editorial makes a good point: When the Florida Supreme Court ruled Gov. Jeb Bush's school-voucher program unconstitutional, justices struck a blow for fairness and common sense in deciding that the state must offer a unified, quality education system. So why stop there?
Corporate Tax Credit Scholarships, an ill-conceived voucher program that gives businesses a dollar-for-dollar tax break if they donate money to private-school tuition for poor children, wasn't addressed in the court's 5-2 ruling. In many ways, these vouchers are more insidious than Mr. Bush's Opportunity Scholarships, which give parents tax money to enroll their child in private schools.The court's failure to address the corporate-tax-credit vouchers in its ruling defies logic and emboldens lawmakers to cement this bad idea into the Florida Constitution. Lawmakers would be wise to go the opposite direction and strike the program from the books before a second case finds itself before the state's highest court and meets the same fate as the Opportunity Scholarship.
And make no mistake: The corporate-tax-credit voucher deserves the same fate.
Why? The main reason: No accountability.
"For the last five or six years, Florida has really been the center of the school voucher universe," Marc Egan, NSBA's director of federal affairs, tells The Christian Science Monitor. "Having been such a flagship, the fact that it is going to lose one—or possibly all—of its voucher programs blows a major hole in the national voucher movement."
Posted January 13, 2006 11:14 AM | Privatization & Choice
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