Supreme Court Takes Away Choice
Florida's Supreme Court ruled its voucher program unconstitutional. Read articles by edweek and the post for coverage. Also, eduwonk comments on what's next...
Personally, I am on the fence about vouchers, but here's what I found interesting:
1) Chief Justice Barbara Periente wrote that vouchers violate state's goal of providing a "uniform" system of public schooling for Florida's students (right, because all schools are the same in the state of Florida. If all schools were really "uniform" then parents wouldn't be lining up to get their kids out of really bad schools and into better ones)
2) While interest groups on both sides are either celebrating or mourning, I would hope that they remember why vouchers existed in the first place; because many public schools are failing our kids and parents wanted a better option. So whether you won or lost the battle yesterday, let's remember what it's really about; quality education for all our kids...and we need to keep working on solutions to ensure "uniform schooling" for every child.
3) Future debates and court decisions will be interesting to watch to see how Florida will influence others. See here and here for voucher debates occurring in Milwaukee and Kansas, respectively.
p.s. would love to hear comments, especially from a certain grad student, not to mention any names (Rachel Bird), who wrote a large research paper analyzing the Florida voucher system.
2 Comments:
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Here’s my thing. According to The Post, about 700 children are attending private or parochial schools through the program. And yet, the soaring rhetoric:
By
"I think it is a sad day for accountability in our state," Bush said. He said the voucher program had a positive effect because it "put pressure on school districts to focus on the underperforming schools."
They’ve transferred a whopping 700 kids statewide and this is a program that “Gov. Jeb Bush considered one of his proudest achievements”?! In a system of 2.5 million students (SY 01-02), does anyone really believe that transferring 700 kids has done anything to improve public schools? That’s right--now they’d better start trying to get through to the kids!
I’m blasé about these limited-scale voucher programs… they’re too small to affect public education quality on a systemic scale, so one of the more convincing potential outcomes of vouchers isn’t achieved. None-the-less the families that do take advantage of targeted voucher programs report being happier with their children’s experiences, and I find it hard to argue that poor kids should be forced to stay in terrible schools now because the $8,000/year tied to their heads might help the system in the long-run.
My question is this: Why was the system so underutilized? We’re seeing the same thing in the (IMO, illogical) “transfer first, supplemental services later” sanction scheme in NCLB. In all but dangerous and flagrantly negligent situations, parents seem to be hesitant to move their kids, even if the current school isn’t great. There’s all the typical roadblocks: logistics, lack of information/awareness, etc, but I think it’s also more to it than that. My theory: Those who tout free market mechanisms as a panacea have a bias. They assume that a school isn’t a meaningful community.
But when your kids go to the neighborhood school, all your neighbors’ kids go there, and you see that the schools are really trying to improve, why abandon ship? I’ve heard lots of arguments like this in site visits I’ve done for one of the projects I'm working on. The affective consideration of community complicates an otherwise cut-and-dry decision about children’s education. And that's a fact that's bigger than polemical tiffs about these little voucher programs.
NMD, at January 06, 2006 11:55 AM
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UPDATE: Catching up on my Eduwonk, and saw this post (emphasis on the last paragraph). Interesting--maybe it's just that vouchers and within-district transfer don't appear to be to parents to be REAL improvements.
By NMD, at January 06, 2006 1:51 PM
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