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Jeb! proposes new pay for pray plan

Jeb! has a new plan to improve public education: shift low performing students into private religious schools that have absolutely no accountability. That way, the students’ low test scores wont drag down the averages of their former classmates, and Jeb! can point to rising test scores and claim to have done something. Oh, and religious institutions will get even more money from the state, which is unconstitutional, but let’s not get bogged down by details. What’s not to like?

Florida would get its fourth, and possibly its largest, school voucher program, with as many as 170,000 poorly scoring children eligible for "Reading Compact" vouchers, under a proposal unveiled by Gov. Jeb Bush Wednesday.

Children who score in the lowest level on the reading portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test three consecutive years could get a voucher to any private school — religious or secular — or to another public school.

Bush said the vouchers are necessary because 17 percent of sixth-graders and 18 percent of eighth-graders have failed the FCAT reading section three years in a row.

"That's a trend," he said. "And that's a trend we need to deal with early on to make sure it doesn't happen systemically."

Critics said that giving the worst-performing students vouchers and letting them disappear into a private school system with no public accountability is no way to solve the problem.

"They said vouchers. And I said no," said Wayne Blanton, director of the Florida School Boards Association, about his briefing from Bush's office on the issue.

Palm Beach County Schools Superintendent Art Johnson said it also could create problems with the balancing of schools for enrollment purposes.

Bush's announcement came Wednesday even though "Opportunity Scholarships" — his first and smallest voucher program, for children at schools receiving an F grade two out of four years — have been declared unconstitutional by a state appeals court because they send public money to religious schools. The Florida Supreme Court is expected to hear oral arguments in the case this spring.

"The governor is just showing a lack of respect for the courts," said Ron Meyer, the lawyer for voucher opponents who successfully argued the case before the 1st District Court of Appeal.

In most respects, the reading vouchers would be more like McKay vouchers for disabled children and corporate tax credit vouchers for poorer children than they are like Opportunity Scholarships in that the McKay and corporate programs have less state oversight and fewer restrictions than the Opportunity program does.

Schools that take Opportunity Scholarship vouchers, for example, must agree to take the state voucher as full payment of tuition and fees, must not discriminate on the basis of religion, and must not force children to pray or worship. And children who get them must take the FCAT each year.

But schools participating in Reading Compact vouchers, according to language by Rep. Rep. Anthony Traviesa, R-Tampa, would be able to ask parents to pay tuition and fees on top of the state voucher amount, would be allowed to admit or not admit children based on religion, and would be allowed to compel worship. Children would not have to take the FCAT, only the standardized test used by the school.

Those test scores would be given to parents — as FCAT scores are. But while public school scores are aggregated and produce an annual grade for every school, the scores from the voucher students would be aggregated across the entire program by an "independent private research organization" that would be prohibited by law from revealing how well particular private schools were doing.

"Why do that? Then we'd know what was going on," quipped Sen. Ron Klein, D-Delray Beach. "The governor always seems to be afraid of accountability when it comes to voucher programs, and I don't know why."