Denisha Merriweather and the Florida Education Association have very different viewpoints on Florida's Tax Credit Scholarships Program. On the one hand the program got a ringing endorsement from Ms. Merriweather recently in the Wall Street Journal. She was one of Florida's low-income minority students who were able to take advantage of it. To say that the FTC Scholarship Program made a difference in her life would be quite an understatement. In her own words,
By the time I was in the fourth grade, I had been held back twice, disliked school, and honestly believed I’d end up a high-school dropout. Instead, three months ago, I earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of West Florida in interdisciplinary social science with a minor in juvenile justice. I am the first member of my family to go to college, let alone graduate. But this didn’t happen by chance, or by hard work alone. It happened because I was given an opportunity.
The difference maker was a scholarship that allowed me to go to a secondary school that was the right fit for me. I was lucky to be raised in Florida, home to the nation’s largest tax-credit scholarship program, a “voucher” program that helps parents pay for private schools. Here’s the cool part: The scholarships are financed entirely by charitable contributions, which are offset by tax credits.
The Florida Department of Education concurs: It's "Good news for choice!"
Good news for choice! To encourage private, voluntary contributions, to expand educational opportunities for children of families that have limited financial resources and to enable children in this state to achieve a greater level of excellence in their education, the 2001 Florida Legislature created s. 220.187, Florida Statutes, establishing the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program. In 2010, the FTC Scholarship Program was expanded and renumbered as Section 1002.395, Florida Statutes.
The law provides for state tax credits for contributions to nonprofit scholarship funding organizations, called SFOs. The SFO's then award scholarships to eligible children of families that have limited financial resources.
As uplifting as Ms. Merriweather's story truly is, somehow the Florida Education Association wants to kill the program that made it possible. The tax-credit scholarship program has been around since 2001, created under Republican Governor Jeb Bush, but recently the FEA has filed a lawsuit that seeks to end it altogether. Says the FEA:
"Florida's voucher programs are a risky experiment that gambles taxpayers' money and children's lives," Florida Education Association Vice President Joanne McCall said in a statement sent out in conjunction with a press conference in Tallahassee. "Florida's voucher schools are largely unregulated, don't have to follow the state's academic standards, don't have to hire qualified teachers and don't have to prove to the state that they are using public money wisely."
You might think that ten-plus years of positive results would allay FEA fears of the risk to children. In fact, Florida comes in first in the nation for developing reading proficiency among low-income fourth-graders. Still, the teachers union wants it gone. Sorry, but the pretended concern about some nebulous risk to Florida's children doesn't ring true.
As ususal, we can follow the money.
Education and advocacy groups are targeting a Florida voucher program that this year will draw $357.8 million in taxpayer money to help send 69,000 low-income students to private schools. The groups filed a lawsuit Thursday alleging that the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, begun in 2001 under former Gov. Jeb Bush, violates the state constitution by diverting tax dollars from public schools.
The tax credit cap, currently 357.8 million, will increase to $447.3 million for next year. Education and advocacy groups (advocates for the Democratic party, no doubt) want that money in public schools where it can feed union dues which will ultimately find their way into Democratic campaign coffers. For their part Democrats are great champions of public education rather than school choice. They know where the money is.
There is another much more insidious aim. Think about who Denisha Merriweather might have become without the FTC Scholarship that paved her way to a college degree. Ms. Merriweather describes that Denisha as a child.
I grew up with my biological mother and we moved around constantly. This really took a toll on my grades—Ds and Fs were the norm. My poor grades and the fact that I was two years older than most of my classmates angered and embarrassed me. I was “disruptive” and fought with other students. Teachers tried to help, but nothing they did seemed to work. I felt no matter how hard I tried, the results would be the same. Learning became a nightmare—a punishment for being a child.
That is the Denisha Merriweather that Democrats would prefer to have as a voting citizen. Without a course correction Ms. Merriweather fully expected to be a high school dropout. Angry, embarrassed, resentful. Think how much more easily she could be persuaded by the Democratic message. You know the one: Her lot in life, low skill, low education, low income, all of that, is because she's caught in a racist trap. A system rigged against her. Yes, it's almost certain that she'd buy into that message.
The funny thing is, had she been stuck in that boat, she would have been right to believe that racism put her there. It's a racist trap, alright, but it's not the doings of a Republican party that Democrats endlessly accuse of racism. (If you disagree with Barack Obama what else could you be but racist?) No, the racist trap is the doing of a Democratic party that takes deliberate, concrete actions to deny opportunity to disadvantaged school children. That's the racist trap. That's what the Democrats are doing in Florida.
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