![Paul Renner channeled his inner Jerry Falwell school choice. (© FlaglerLive)](https://i0.wp.com/flaglerlive.com/wp-content/uploads/paul-renner-school-choice.jpg?resize=1000%2C665&ssl=1)
It would be absurd, I think we can all agree, if Paul Renner, our esteemed Speaker of the House and Flagler’s chief pork slabber, were to champion a bill entitling every citizen to take out $2,000 from their local policing budgets so they can have their own private security and call it “Police Choice.” After all, don’t we all pay taxes? Shouldn’t we have a choice how that money is spent? Don’t we free Floridians know best? Sheriff Rick Staly would be the first to tell Renner he’s out of his mind.
It would be absurd, I think we can all agree, if Renner, claiming that taxpayers shouldn’t have their park choices limited to Holland and Ralph Carter Park, were to champion a bill entitling every household to take out $1,000 from the parks and rec budget so they could help subsidize their Disney and Universal experiences and call it “Park Choice.” Even Renner’s chamber of commerce courtesans would tell him he’s out of his mind.
But not too many people told Renner he was out of his mind when he did exactly that to public schools: he championed a bill entitling every child in Florida to $8,000 a year to spend on private education, at the public school system’s expense, and called it “school choice.” The few who did were themselves told they’re out of their mind.
“School choice” is an orchestrated demolition of public schools and the social contract. The focus-group euphemism masks the thieving of tax dollars to subsidize private schools, transforming what was once an aspiration of fringe Christian and anti-government militants into state doctrine. “I hope to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have public schools,” the televangelist and founder of the Moral Majority Jerry Falwell said in a 1979 sermon. “The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be.” Falwell lived long enough to see Jeb Bush’s Florida reopen that door. Renner swung the wrecking ball.
Flagler County schools are losing close to $11 million this year to “choice,” siphoned out so 1,250 students can get their $8,000 either for private school or home school. True, not every one of these students was attending Flagler schools before, so it’s not a net loss of 1,250 students. But very few of these students were either qualifying or getting taxpayer subsidies before. Exactly 136 did in Flagler just four years ago, costing the district less than $1 million. Now anyone qualifies, including millionaire families, and every dollar going to them is a dollar diverted from public education.
That figure of 1,250 students is for the first full year of this “choice” being in effect. Coming years will only accelerate the drain on public schools, because if you have children you’d be out of your mind not to take the $8,000-per-child handout, especially since most of you aren’t paying anywhere near $8,000 in school taxes each year. The rest of us, and even more so businesses and renters, are subsidizing the swindle.
Advocates of the swindle have come up with a couple of defenses: first, that they’re taxpayers who should choose where their money is spent–the untenable argument that would then support “police choice” and “park choice,” and if you push that logic far enough, “war choice,” as in: you may spend my money on the Ukraine war but not the genocide of Palestinians. But in our social contract how our taxes are spent is not an a-la-carte option, though Boomer narcissists who can’t see past the hedge of their gated community think it should be so.
Second, the advocates claim the dollars “follow the child,” as if public money going to private subsidies were new money that doesn’t affect public school budgets. It’s excellent propaganda. But it’s a double-barreled lie–double-barreled, because not only is every student lost to the public schools a loss of $8,000, but every student who was never enrolled in public school but is now getting the $8,000 compounds that loss, since these are public dollars that would have otherwise been allocated to public schools.
Incidentally, we don’t say that people receiving food stamps are on “food choice.” We don’t say that people getting Temporary Assistance for Needy Families are on “poverty choice.” When people get free money from the government, we call it welfare. Ditching the ordurous school-choice euphemism and applying the language’s proper definition–school welfare–exposes the state’s fabrications.
Facts do the rest. The welfare kings and queens this time are much richer than those on food stamps. As the Miami Herald reported Sunday, “Last school year, the average income of families who provided income data and received scholarships for a family of four was $86,000.” (To be eligible for food choice this year a family of four can’t have a household income above $62,400.)
According to Step Up for Students, the state’s arm administering school welfare, 82 percent of handouts went to students attending religious schools–madrassas–like one in Palm Coast that boasts of “raising champions for Christ” and still sports a crusader for a mascot, which is no less offensive to a few hundred million people than if it flew the Confederate or Nazi flags. Our tax dollars are subsidizing that kind of bigotry.
More perniciously: When Bush started the welfare-to-school wagon he limited it to the disabled and the needy. Minorities benefited disproportionately. It was a form of segregation in reverse, like affirmative action. Renner’s scheme, like so much under Gov. Ron DeSantis, revives pre-Brown v. Board of Education segregation. By eliminating eligibility barriers, wealthier families use the subsidy as a bridge to very expensive public schools whose tuition keeps the riff raff out, even with $8,000 subsidies. A family might’ve afforded a $9,000 school but couldn’t afford a $15,000 school. So clever schools adjust their tuition just so as a barrier to undesirables and to make extra profit, thus cashing in twice over: in dollars and in whitening their own “choice” of who gets in. Et voilà. Jerry Falwell’s jolly jowly ideal realized.
Of course innumerable schools are metastasizing like cancer to take advantage of welfare money: you’ll see them everywhere. The state is begging them to start up. It’s easy, because the crowning achievement of the swindle is that schools getting welfare don’t have to match public school standards. Admittedly in Florida the standards are not much to speak of, but they’re still stronger than most of those fly-by-night schools hoping to cash in on the dole. None of the schools, rich or lousy, have to provide the huge range of services public schools are required to, such as special education, athletics, free transportation. Nor even safety protocols.
In a lesser known swindle, the big theft also now requires public schools to transfer millions of their dollars for the building maintenance of charter schools, the privately run, already publicly funded schools like Imagine at Town Center, whose parent company some years ago was court-ordered to pay back $1 million for running a real estate scheme with public dollars. The Florida Legislature has now legalized the scheme. Imagine at Town center received $700,000 this year for capital improvements, siphoned out of the district’s budget.
Finally, to make sure the dagger cuts deeply and fatally, the state makes it mandatory for school districts to advertise school welfare on their websites. Districts like Flagler must make it as easy as possible for parents to apply for the money and get out of the district, while the state provides a detailed list of private schools to choose from, including, of course, every madrassa under the sky. State and districts could not be shouting louder: Public schools suck. Here’s $8,000. $16,000. $24,000. Now leave.
As students continue to be bribed out, public schools will be left with less money, all the responsibilities for higher standards, more challenging students, crumbling buildings and, revoltingly, school board members and superintendents in full Stockholm Syndrome mode. You hear them in board meetings not only talking about school welfare but praising it, pandering to it, the way the condemned suck up to their executioner.
There are exceptions. Our own Colleen Conklin for years has been sounding the alerts about the swindle, starting with the charter schemes. She thankfully kept a few of those out of the district, back when local school boards had a say. They no longer do. And Conklin is leaving in November. Our remaining board members love the school welfare swindle and are probably trying to figure out how to cash in with their own kids without looking like public school traitors.
But as Jerry Falwell implied, it’s a matter of time before those school board members are surplus property, like public school buildings, like buses, for that matter like teachers, counselors, paraprofessionals, bus drivers and administrators, all of whom are already treated like disposable obstructions in the way of school welfare and the cult known as “parental rights.”
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece aired on WNZF.
Bailey’s Mom says
I totally agree, it’s absurd that public tax money is allowed to be swindled out for private & religious schools!
If you want that for your children then you pay for it. Period.
These fools need to be voted out before it gets worse.
Private Police & Fire Departments, then the military. I think the Government Officials need to remember that it is We who pay their salaries, We need to stop all the selfish Me people and get back to For The People and invest in our Public Schools and Departments to benefit the whole community.
Daniel says
Orchestrated demolition? These are taxpayers making a choice about where their tax dollars are better spent for the sake of their children’s education.
‘Woke will make you broke’ appears to be true. Blame the school’s chosen curriculum.
Jim says
Well said. I’m glad my kids are out of school. I feel for those parents in Florida who are sending their kids to public school expecting an education that will start preparing them for entering the world but who are going to see the drop in quality as we proceed with this farce.
And for those sending their kids to private school, good luck. I have a niece who graduated from a prestigious private school and even through college. She’s living at home with a minimum wage job because she got absolutely no preparation for the real world.
In Florida we’re in a rapid race to the bottom.
Marvin says
This is an article that I might expect to be written by an education insider or other government bureaucrat for whom throwing money at a problem is always the only answer.
As someone who has substitute talk in public and private schools and had children in both systems in both Flagler and Volusia county schools, I am more convinced that something akin to the voucher program remains very important to families truly concerned about getting a quality education for their children.
First, anything the government runs is usually going to be bloated and inefficient, and I was a government manager for enough years to admit that. The school system, complete with union influence, is a sterling example of this, and compounded with a mentality that “bigger is better” for sports reasons and economy of scale, I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel.
When I oversaw the delinquency and dependency prosecutions throughout Volusia, Flagler, St John’s, and Putnam counties, I saw firsthand the problems in our public schools and there were many investigations into their causes.
Without getting into a treatise, our parents are largely to blame. Too many parents send their kids to school, expecting overwhelmed teachers to deal with discipline issues, apathy, and psychological problems an institution cannot effectively handle. These parents are the first to jump on the institution when it fails to accomplish what they were too lazy or inept to handle themselves at home.
The parents who care enough to want a good education for their children or who want to separate them from the behavioral issues in a larger institution, either adapt their household budget to pay for private schooling (before vouchers), or tried homeschooling or Florida’s virtual School programs. These parents were still paying taxes to support the public institution they were now avoiding. Many did not think this was fair, but then, senior citizens and childless people also support our educational institutions.
The parents who wanted a better education for their children or tried to isolate their children from disciplinary/safety/bullying problems in larger institutions, but could not afford private tuition, were sadly out of luck. As parents who paid a lot to remove our children from the public schools where my relatives were teachers and a school board superintendent in the past, we felt guilty about that somewhat elite status.
The school voucher program levels the playing field quite a bit, allowing concerned parents more options. On the negative side, it can leave the more problematic or apathetic situations in the public school system.
Sitting through substitute teacher orientation with full-time teachers and subs recently, I know that many teachers recognize the bureaucracy must accept a lot of the blame for a failing public education system. It’s not the teachers fault. You can spend days reviewing the red tape imposed by federal and state officials on local school administrators and find fault. You can recognize that as any organization gets larger there is generally less efficiency, less accountability, a slower time to react to needs, and more snowballing growing larger and larger year after year.
Smaller private schools, whether religious or otherwise, and charter schools can avoid this.
A retired bureaucrat argued with me that smaller private schools can’t necessarily afford nice chemistry labs, for example. I responded from first-hand experience that a lab is worthless if some administrator failed to order supplies before the school year started, whether it be due to an oversight, a change in approved suppliers, or a budget shift.
But again, the biggest problem to me is the troublemaking or apathetic student whose parents haven’t invested enough time or energy into that child to cause them to respect the job a teacher is trying to do in the classroom, thus depriving the students who wish to learn of that opportunity. Until you learn how to fix that, you can’t blame concerned parents for trying to place their child in a different environment so they can learn.
I say focus on fixing the problem or else adapt to changing societal mores and lowered standards and give parents a range of school options…let the parent choose whether they want stricter discipline and educational requirements for their child, or a more lax experience requiring less parental involvement perhaps.
Continuing to dump large sums of public money into an educational system that was failing long before vouchers came along is not a bright thing to do. Voucher programs didn’t create this mess we have, and while it is politically convenient to blame innovations that didn’t necessarily come from within the education bureaucracy, it misses the root problem, a much tougher conversation.
Pierre Tristam says
Literacy helps. You missed the part where the government you do despise is scheming against public schools, and the part that details that the bleeding of money out of public schools. In inflation adjusted dollars, Flagler schools are getting 10 to 15 percent less money than they were 10 years ago, before accounting for the current heist. Your facts, your premise, are wrong. Ideology is no substitute. This is not an argument you can win, not with shoddy political talking points. Incidentally, calling me an “education insider” suggests you haven’t been familiar with my coverage of the local school district (well, the dismal school board, anyway: let’s not indict the professional educators because morons rule the school board.) But I shouldn’t presume beyond the comprehension skills you so inelegantly display. (Nevertheless, Public schools are expert at literacy. Yay Title I! Try them.)
Skibum says
It is meant to be a complete undoing of America’s public education system, a viscous circle where taxpayer dollars is taken from public education and handed out to private, mostly “religious” based schools, causing our public education to erode due to lack of funding. Then proclamations are made about how horrible our schools are so more money is taken away, causing further erosion and teachers leaving, causing more parents who want to use the taxpayer funds handed to them to pay for private schools. Then MAGA elected officials throw out how they not only want to defund the federal education department… they want to completely eliminate it altogether. Sounds to me like what MAGA is working to create a totally religious based school system for American youth. Wait, isn’t that what the Taliban already created? What’s next… telling our country’s young girls that they aren’t allowed to be educated because their place is in the house, learning only those household skills allowed be the men who make all of the rules and now laws? At what point will it be too late to stop our public education system that is currently circling the drain, about to get flushed down the toilet for good?
Tim says
Public schools need some competition and accountability.
Pierre Tristam says
No argument there. Understanding that currently there’s immeasurably more accountability in public schools than there is in any other school. No exception. If you can prove me wrong, you’re welcome to it, but you will not. You cannot.
Truth says
Hear me out. The expansion of this program was not for the reasons stated. It was to accommodate developers. With the over- growth they campaigned for ( were free!) they created multiple issues, one of the overcrowding of public schools. So what better way to ease up the needs for new schools which cost serious money, than to pass the buck to every half ass private school. If this program would collapse tomorrow and these kids had to come back into the public school system there would be no room. Thats the real reason they did it.
Deborah Coffey says
A perfect column written with exactly the right amount of disgust. There are 3 things Republicans have wanted to get rid of forever…Social Security, Medicare, and public schools. It takes a certain amount of Fascism to accomplish these goals and, Florida has almost reached its goal under Ron DeSantis. When he refuses to leave office at the end of his term, it will have reached its goal.
But, people continue to vote for anyone with an (R) next to their name on the ballot and then they whine and cry about how terrible their lives are. The LIES coming out of Tallahassee on The Capitolist are just incredible. If we won’t take the time to be good, competent citizens and find the TRUTH, then maybe we deserve the worst of what’s coming….Can you count the freedoms you’ve already lost under the Fascist Ron DeSantis administration?
The dude says
If we’re being honest here… there wasn’t much here to “destroy” that hadn’t already been.
Joe D says
The SARCASM would be amusing if the FACTS about “School Choice” weren’t so TRUE.
This whole Florida State Legislation on this issue (supported by our Governor) is a NATIONAL DISGRACE! I’m HOPING SOMEONE files a lawsuit against the law! Of course the taxpayers will be paying the court fees to defend the legal challenges, too.