So Much for That
The Florida Supreme Court knocked the wind out of Gov. Jeb Bush’s education revamp Thursday, ruling that the private-school voucher program violates the state Constitution’s promise of a “uniform system of free public schools.”
Watched nationwide, the 5-2 decision topples Opportunity Scholarships, the only statewide voucher program in the country. It also raises doubts about two related voucher programs.
The ruling shatters the biggest stick Bush wielded to boost performance – the ability to use tax dollars to leave a failing public school for a private one.
We had plenty of failing schools here in the Third World, (two Escambia County qualifiers and the only two in the entire STATE) triggering a lottery for those ‘voucher’ spaces. The result was the exact opposite of what you’d think would happen. There was no jubilant flood of students leaving our pathetic public schools, siphoning money from this disgrace of a school district. Warum nicht? I mean, who wouldn’t want their kid O-U-T, right? The simple fact was that there were no spaces available in private schools in the community and they asked everybody. The Catholic/Montessori schools were the only ones to open their doors, bar none. The Christian schools (and we have tons of them) wouldn’t accept students who were there only for an education vice indoctrination, and the tony private academies…well, you can imagine. They certainly didn’t want their rarified air clogged up with the stench of the working lower and middle classes.
Charity begins at home and she was at the mall when they were looking for places to send voucher kids around Bangla-cola. It didn’t make no never mind, since it was only a good idea as long as they went to someone else’s school.
People | Mr. Bingley | 
January 6, 2006 9:54 am
Subscribe
This seems like a non-surprising result. It is as though the plan was to effectively shut down the bottom half schools, assuming that bottom half schools would then never exist again.
There is a good example in Freakonomics. In it, the Chicago Public Schools are studied. The CPS let students change schools through a lottery system. The results found that the students who applied to change schools did equally well whether or not they actually changed schools.
Ah, my good old “friends” on the Florida Supreme Court. I’d really best not get started, or I might never stop. The only surprise here is that Charlie Wells sided with the majority: I really am genuinely STUNNED by that. He’s the brains on the court by several orders of magnitude and usually has a lot of sense too.
Thinking About Whether to “Go There”
The recent Florida Supreme Court case on school vouchers is tempting me to really go off on a tearing rant about that institution, but I don’t know if I should, and so I’m going to hold back just a little…