School-Choice Advocate Sees Upside to Florida Ruling Against Vouchers
by Jim Brown
January 23, 2006
(AgapePress) - - An education policy expert says a recent decision by the Florida Supreme Court to toss out the state's tuition voucher program that allows public money to go to private schools violates good sense on every level. Earlier this month, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the state's Opportunity Scholarship Program violates the Florida Constitution, which requires "a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high-quality system of free public schools." The program, said the court, is illegal because it sets up an "alternative system" that is not accountable to the state. The program currently serves about 700 students. (See earlier article)
Lil Tuttle is education director at the Virginia-based Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, a group that states as one of its purposes "to promote school choice opportunities for all K-12 children in America." Tuttle calls the Florida court's judgment "irrational" and believes it made an activist decision to force its liberal agenda on Floridians.
"The most difficult thing to understand is why they would set aside something that is clearly and unequivocally designed to help children and to improve their education simply for a political motive, just to protect the public schools," Tuttle says disgustingly. "I think that is just utterly and completely absurd."
The Institute official says the Florida high court failed to see that "habitually failing public schools in Florida are an equally direct violation of the constitutional mandate to maintain a 'high-quality system of free public schools.'"
But Tuttle sees a bit of a silver lining in the ruling. While she says the ruling was "terrible," it does indicate that vouchers are problematic. "When you have a direct state-funded system going to private schools, you've got a public school industry that will forever fight it on every level -- even to the nonsense of a single word like 'uniform,'" she observes.
"What we do see, I think as the school-choice theory and the practice evolves, is more and more people are looking to tuition tax credits."
Tuttle believes tuition tax credits are a better option not only because they allow families to keep their won money and use it as they see fit, but also they are insulated from the kind of legal gamesmanship in which the Florida Supreme Court engaged.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
