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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ's) about School Vouchers
When was the voucher bill enacted?
Gov. Bush launched the voucher plan on Monday, June 21, 1999. The law started out as HB 751, enacted by the Florida House of Representatives. After undergoing some changes in the Senate, the bill was enacted about 60 days later as Fla. Stat. §229.0537.
When would the proposed plan go into effect?
Checks will be written to schools as soon as this fall for the 1999/2000 school year.
In general, how do vouchers work? Specifically, how does the Florida voucher program work?
Vouchers (or "opportunity scholarships" as they are now euphemistically called) are government payments to private schools or to parents to subsidize student attendance at nonpublic schools.
In general, Gov. Bush's education plan assigns every public school a grade, A through F, based on student performance on the FCAT, or the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Under the "Opportunity Scholarship Program" component, Fla. Stat. §229.0537, students at schools graded F in two out of four years (during one of which the student was in attendance) have three options if they wish to transfer to another school. First, such students may attend a designated higher-performing public school in their school district. Second, such students may attend - on a space available basis - any public school in an adjacent school district. Third, such students may attend any private school, including a sectarian or religious school, which has admitted the student and has agreed to comply with the requirements set forth in the voucher plan.
If a student chooses the third option, the state will pay an amount "equivalent" to the "public education funds" that would have been expended on a public education for the student in tuition and fees at a qualifying private school and will continue to do so until the student graduates from high school. The amount could range from $3,000 to $25,000, depending on what extra services the student needs. Although the amount of school vouchers may not exceed the amount charged by a qualifying private school in tuition and fees, there is nothing in the voucher plan that would prevent a private school from raising its tuition and fees to capture the maximum available return under the voucher plan, or even from charging higher tuition for those students attending the school under the auspices of the voucher plan.
It is true that participating private schools must "determine on an entirely random and religious-neutral basis, which students to accept" and comply with the prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin set forth in 42 U.S.C. §2000d. However, despite private schools having to agree that they will not "compel any student … to profess a specific ideological belief, to pray or to worship," (emphasis added) the voucher plan does not prohibit a school from requiring a student to receive religious instruction or place any limitation on the uses to which schools can put voucher payments.
Parents are required to notify the state of their intent to request a school voucher for their child by no later than July 1 of the school year in which they intend to use the voucher. The first round of voucher payments is scheduled to be made on August 1 of this year.
Two elementary schools in Pensacola will be the first in the state to qualify for vouchers in the upcoming school year. At least five schools, four of them Catholic, have agreed to accept voucher students. While the program will start small, it could explode as the state raises standards for schoolchildren and more schools are given a failing grade. Eventually, up to 156,000 Florida schoolchildren may obtain vouchers, roughly eight times that of the rest of the nation combined. Moreover, no other state bases its voucher program on student performance, and Florida's plan has attracted national attention on that score, as well.
Doesn't Florida have a long tradition of school choice programs? How are vouchers different?
It is true that Florida has had, in other contexts, its share of school choice programs, including religious schools among options in such programs as Bright Futures Scholarships, Florida Resident Access Grants and subsidized day care. However, none of these programs drain K-12 public schools of their money in order to fund religious or parochial schools. Furthermore, past federal programs such as the G.I. bill, which involved school choice at the higher education level and was not restricted to public schools, did not have the practical effect of subsidizing primarily religious or sectarian schools.
What other states have proposed vouchers? What has happened to those proposals?
Voucher plans in other states, save one, have been rejected by the public in referenda (California, Michigan), ruled unconstitutional (Puerto Rico, Maine, Cleveland) or struck down but are still on appeal (Vermont). Until the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court decision regarding the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, it has not been constitutionally permissible anywhere in the country to use taxpayer dollars to support the attendance of any student at a parochial K12 school. The constitutional argument may ultimately be decided in the U.S. Supreme Court or the various state supreme courts. Regardless of how the Supreme Court decides the legal issues, vouchers are bad public policy.
Legally, why is the ACLU challenging school vouchers?
The ACLU has been in the forefront of the fight against vouchers and in support of public education. We have lobbied in opposition to vouchers in Congress and the State legislatures, and have been actively involved in lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of vouchers in Wisconsin, Ohio, Vermont, Maine, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The ACLU lobbied in opposition to the voucher program in the recently concluded Florida Legislative Session. We have joined with other civil rights groups, public education advocates, educators, parents of children attending public schools and school board members and have filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Florida voucher program.
Most private schools in Florida are affiliated with a religious group, institution, or organization, or include a religious component in their educational program ("sectarian schools"). Almost all of these sectarian schools are "pervasively sectarian," as that term has been used by the U.S. Supreme Court. This means that the secular and sectarian aspects of the education that they provide are "inextricably intertwined." Because these pervasively sectarian schools are generally larger than other private schools, they enroll a disproportionately high percentage of all Florida private school students. For instance, in Escambia County alone, the site of the pilot vouchers, twenty of the 25 eligible private schools are sectarian, and most of them are "pervasively sectarian." For instance, according to the Little Flower School mission statement, the "young people in Little Flower School must experience the Gospel in order to proclaim it now and throughout their adult lives." These twenty schools enroll over 93% of the K-12 private school pupils in Escambia County.
Forcing taxpayers to fund the choice of a religious education for their neighbor's children is unconstitutional. The U.S. Constitution requires separation of church and state. Moreover, the Florida State Constitution is more explicit than the federal Establishment Clause. Florida Constitution, Article I, the Declaration of Rights, Section 3, Religious Freedom states: "No revenue . . . shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution." Because no restrictions are placed on the uses to which voucher payments can be put, the payments can be used to advance sectarian interests via the funding of religious services, the construction and maintenance of religious places of worship, and religious proselytizing.
Voucher proponents who advance the "minimal aid" argument - i.e. that the plan falls within the bounds of Florida case law that allows minimal aid to sectarian institutions - are missing the point. The bottom line is that even a conservative estimate of an annual $3,000-per-student for up to 156,000 students, for a total of roughly $500 million annually in the state of Florida, far exceeds minimal aid.
Moreover, the State must comply with Florida Constitution Article IX, Section 1. Public Education, which mandates the State to "make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders" via a "uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education." Voucher plan proponents say that the State has reached the point where in order to comply with this mandate, the State has to resort to paying private schools to provide a quality public school education. The problem is that Gov. Bush's voucher plan sweeps too broadly. It is not structured as an option of last resort when the entire public school system has failed the student, but rather as one of three options, two of which are public school options.
In fact, once a student receives a voucher, the student may continue to attend a private school at public expense at least until he or she finishes middle school, regardless of any change in the "grade" assigned to the student's public school in the interim. Unless the student has chosen a private school that does not offer a high-school education, the student will remain eligible for a voucher through high school as well, even if the public high school to which he or she otherwise would have been assigned has never been designated a "failing" school.
Finally the State must adhere to Florida Constitution Article IX, 6, which provides that "income derived from the state school shall, and the principal of the fund may, be appropriated but only to the support and maintenance of free public schools."
As a matter of public policy, don't vouchers help schoolchildren, rather than hurt them?
In the short run, vouchers may help the tiny percentage of students that receive them - although parents will not know whether the private or parochial school is providing a better education because, under the "A+ education plan," private and parochial schools are exempt from the grading system used to measure public school performance. In the long run, however, the 90% of children who remain in their neighborhood public school will be harmed because they will be attending more impoverished schools. Voucher proponents claim that they are helping the poorest kids from the most troubled school districts. Although vouchers allow some children to leave failing schools for supposedly better schools, vouchers have many drawbacks.
First, tax dollars are diverted from public secular institutions to private religious institutions. Vouchers fuel the abandonment of the public schools and provide financial assistance to often wealthy parents who already send their children to private schools.
Second, under the Florida Constitution, the State has a "paramount duty" to provide for an "efficient, safe, secure and high quality" public education system. In other words, the State must turn the currently failing schools into passing schools. Instead, government support for private schools inevitably translates into less money for already struggling public schools, the weakening of the public school system, and the further segregation of schoolchildren. In 1994, 4.8 million students in the U.S. were enrolled in private schools. At a conservative estimate of $3,000 per voucher, that is $14 billion to be reallocated from public to private schools.
Third, there is little, if any, state regulation of private and parochial schools. It is unclear under the voucher plan to what extent private schools have to make special accommodations for students with special education needs or physical disabilities. Thus, the children most in need of help may be left out in the cold.
Finally, there is no convincing evidence that low-income children, given public money to go to private schools, actually do better in math and reading than children in public schools. In a recent report commissioned by the State of Ohio, researchers found that the promise of a voucher program in Cleveland had not been fulfilled. They found "no significant difference" between students using vouchers and a comparable sample from Cleveland's public schools.
In fact, Fla. Stat. §229.0537 does not require that the private school a student attends with a voucher offer a higher quality education than the public school the student would have attended. Indeed, participating private schools are not subject to the school grading system (Fla. Stat. §229.57) of Gov. Bush's overall education plan, or any other state school grading system.
Isn't the ACLU stance hostile to religion?
To the contrary, there is an abundance of religious freedom in this country precisely because we honor the separation between church and state and require government neutrality in religion.
In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the Lemon v. Kurtzman decision, put forth a test for determining whether a law or government policy has breached the wall between church and state. The Lemon test lays a basic framework for the courts by asking whether the government's action has a religious purpose; whether the primary effect of the government's action is to advance or endorse religion; and whether the government's action fosters excessive government "entanglement" with religion. As the Supreme court put it, the principle consideration is whether or not the government is "endorsing" religion.
What are some alternatives to vouchers that would help the public school system?
Vouchers do not address the fundamental reasons behind public school problems. The cure lies in reducing class size, setting performance standards for students, ensuring adequate books, improving technology, training teachers, adding services to students, funding innovative programming, increasing parental involvement in schools and their children's lives and improving the physical environment of the schools.
Why is Florida's case so significant?
Gov. Bush's voucher plan is the nation's most far- reaching voucher experiment. It is the first state-wide voucher program and is by far the largest and most costly private school voucher plan in the nation. Florida is the fifth and largest state in the nation to enact a voucher law. No other state bases its voucher program on student performance, and Florida's plan has attracted national attention.
By 2000, 169 Florida public schools could potentially be labeled failing schools based on student test scores. Another 1,011 schools could be considered dangerously close to failing. All of Florida's 2 million schoolchildren will be adversely affected - either by being sent to religious schools or by being left behind in public schools drained of their money.
