On Monday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law an outrageously expensive universal school voucher law that he had pushed through the Florida legislature on a fast track.
Things were not so good for public schools in Florida even prior to the voucher expansion last week. For Time Magazine, William Kleinknecht reports: “More than four years into the DeSantis governorship, Florida continues to languish toward the bottom of state rankings assessing the quality of health care, school funding, long-term elder care, and other areas key to a successful society… Not only did Florida rank 49th in the country for average teacher pay in 2020, but the Education Law Center… found in a 2021 report that the state had the seventh-lowest (public school) per-pupil funding in the country.”
The new, universal Education Savings Account voucher program will only make things worse.
How did school privatization explode so efficiently in Florida? The president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten quotes the declared strategy of Christopher Rufo, Governor DeSantis’s political provocateur who has been working to inflame the public education culture wars in Florida: “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust….”
For Politico Magazine, Michael Kruse profiles Rufo: “Rufo is the latest iteration of a certain sort of person in the DeSantis orbit and operation—sicced at the governor’s behest to pick a point-scoring fight that generates headlines and left-of-center outrage while simultaneously riling and feeding the most vociferous groups of the GOP’s red-meat wings…. Part mercenary, and part emissary, a mix of a think-tank wonk and a social-media troll, Rufo for the last year and a half has been a main source and surrogate for what DeSantis has sought to make his signature—school boards and higher ed, Disney, and issues of teaching and tolerance of gender and sexuality, the overarching palette of policies that DeSantis describes as ‘anti-woke’ and that has been the primary political fuel of his post-pandemic assent.”
DeSantis and his Florida operatives have used the following tools to discredit public schooling:
- attacking the content of an AP African American Studies class;
- imposing book bans and vague bans on classroom discussions of so-called critical race theory, gender, and sexuality—policies that leave teachers questioning exactly what can be said and what can be read;
- banning diversity, equity and inclusion at the state’s public universities; and
- replacing public college trustees and a college president with people who are tools of Ron DeSantis.
On Monday of this week, March 27, after months of sowing public distrust of public schools, public universities, and public school educators, Governor DeSantis signed Florida House Bill 1, a universal voucher program into law. With the new universal “Education Savings Account” vouchers, Florida joins five other states—Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Utah, and West Virginia—in diverting public dollars to all kinds of unregulated education including homeschooling and small family or neighborhood micro schools.
For the Orlando Sentinel, Leslie Postal explains: “Under the new law, the income guidelines are wiped out, though preference will be given to those from low- and middle-income backgrounds. The result of the universal voucher law is that all of the 2.9 million public school-age children in Florida could opt for an ‘Education Savings Account,’ if they left public schools, and those already homeschooled or in private school could seek the money too. ‘It expands school choice to every single student in the state of Florida,’ DeSantis said. ‘This bill is a major game changer.'”
Before this week, Florida already had several different voucher programs, but Postal explains: “The new legislation turns the state’s biggest scholarship programs—the Tax Credit Scholarship Program and the Family Empowerment Scholarship Program—into so-called education savings accounts. It also increases a cap on the number of scholarships available for students with disabilities.”
The Education Law Center released an analysis showing that the vouchers are almost certain to rob Florida’s public schools of essential operating dollars: “The Florida Empowerment Scholarship vouchers are funded by rerouting state education funding from a student’s residential school district to cover the voucher. Current private school students and homeschooled students are not included in district enrollment totals. This means that approximately $2 billion in new state funding would be required to fund vouchers for these students. If the state does not increase revenue to cover the cost of students already in private education, the reallocation of state aid to vouchers will leave school districts with significantly less revenue to fund the remaining public school students… This financial drain would impact districts differently depending on their current public and private school population.”
The Education Law Center describes final projections from its analysts and researchers at the Florida Policy Institute: “High-income families, current private school students, and homeschooled students would be newly eligible for vouchers under the… law. Even under conservative estimates, Florida Empowerment Scholarship vouchers would cost the state about $4 billion in the initial year of HB 1 implementation. This does not include costs for the proposed expansion of the Florida tax credit scholarship vouchers ($568 million in 2021-2022).”
The Orlando Sentinel‘s Postal quotes Sadaf Knight, the executive director of the Florida Policy Institute: “By opening up the floodgates of funding to private education, including by giving vouchers to the wealthiest families in the state, HB 1 presents a significant long-term risk to the funding for our public schools.”
This doesn’t worry Governor DeSantis. Postal quotes DeSantis during the bill-signing ceremony at Christopher Columbus High School in Miami, a private boys school. The voucher program is: “the largest expansion of education choice not only in the history of this state but in the history of these United States… That is a big deal.”
janresseger 
Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads.
DeSantis is destroying public education in Florida. If he became president of the US, think of the possibilities. We could become the most ignorant society on earth, not just in Florida.