Henry Fortier, superintendent of Catholic schools for the Orlando Diocese in Florida, offered a comeback today to a column by Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell.
In his piece, entitled “Like zombies, school vouchers rise from dead,” Maxwell wrote that the tax credit scholarship bill now awaiting Gov. Rick Scott’s signature “isn’t about reform.”
“It’s about taking money from public schools, shifting it to private ones — and not even making sure it’s being spent properly or that kids are learning anything. And just like “Night of the Living Dead,” that’s darn scary.”
In his response, Fortier highlighted Artayia Wesley, a scholarship student who attends Orlando’s St. Andrew Catholic School, which is designated a Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education. He also noted how the education landscape is changing in response to parental choice, and how those parents do hold private schools accountable. Here a few choice graphs:
Today’s public-education students enjoy an expanding menu of options, including open enrollment, magnet programs, career academies, online courses, International Baccalaureate, charter schools and scholarships for disabled students.
There is no reason to view any of these options as being in conflict with one another, or any of them as an attack on the traditional neighborhood school. We know from numerous independent financial evaluations on the tax-credit scholarships that they save tax money that can be used to enhance district schools. We know from academic research that the public schools most impacted by the loss of scholarship students are themselves achieving commendable test-score gains for low-income students.
While the private schools that participate in the scholarship don’t follow all the same rules and tests and grades as public schools, they are indeed held to account for how they spend their money and how well their students perform.
Every school with more than $250,000 in scholarships is required to submit an annual financial report by an independent accountant. Every scholarship student in grades three through 10 is required to take a nationally norm-referenced test approved by the state, and those scores are reported publicly every year statewide and for every school with at least 30 tested students.
Perhaps more important, though, any parent can choose on any day to remove a student from any one of the scholarship schools. Most of the scholarship parents are also paying out of pocket to cover the gap between the scholarship and tuition, and with paying parents, the accountability factor is high and constant if our schools are not meeting the needs of each family.
You can read Fortier’s op-ed in full here. (But be forewarned: The newspaper has a pay wall.)
