Public schools don’t get good news all of the time, so when it happens, it’s cause for celebration.
First up, Jeb Bush’s drive to use public funds to pay for private school tuition was dealt a serious set back yesterday when a state appeals court ruled Bush’s voucher scheme is unconstitutional.
The 2-1 decision by the 1st District Court of Appeal upholds an August 2002 ruling by a trial judge, who said the law violates the separation of church and state and a provision of the state constitution that bans the use of tax dollars for religious schools.
It’s odd to me why Jeb thought he’d win this one. Article I, Section 3 of the state Constitution explains that “[n]o revenue of the state … shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid … of any sectarian institution.” There aren’t a lot of ambiguities there, especially for a program that took revenue of the state from the public treasury to aid sectarian institutions.
And as my friends at Americans United noted, this could be part of a key national trend. Two-thirds of the states — 37, in all — have provisions in their state constitutions similar to Florida’s, suggesting voucher advocates may run into trouble having their schemes pass constitutional muster and discourage lawmakers from even trying.
The other piece of encouraging news for schools came this morning in the New York Times, which reported that charter schools aren’t delivering on their promises.
The first national comparison of test scores among children in charter schools and regular public schools shows charter school students often doing worse than comparable students in regular public schools.
The findings, buried in mountains of data the Education Department released without public announcement, dealt a blow to supporters of the charter school movement, including the Bush administration.
For those not familiar with the charter school phenomenon, many reform-minded educational professionals began touting this new approach to public schooling in the early 1990s. The idea would be to allow interested parties, including private businesses, to create their own pseudo-public schools, open them up to enrollment, and get money from the state based on the number of students. These charter schools would operate independently from state educational guidelines and regulations, despite the fact that the schools’ budgets were financed by taxpayers. The idea is predicated on the notion that innovative educators could get better results free of teachers’ unions, red tape, and burdensome bureaucracy. That’s the idea, anyway.
The reality is far different. Many charter schools hire untrained educators without college degrees, administrators who shut down schools mid-year without explanation, and school operators who have committed fraud to bilk the state. In one infamous example from last year, a charter school in Arizona was in such terrible debt, school officials fired the custodian and forced each of the students to clean the facilities for an hour a day.
Of course, it’s not just Arizona. There was a charter school in Missouri run by a company founded by Wal-Mart heir John Walton that refused to do required criminal background checks on staff. There was one near Denver that forced students to leave school and spend their days in church if caught misbehaving. A charter school in Silicon Valley charged students’ parents up to $400 a month despite a state law that said the schools could not charge tuition. Another charter school in Egg Harbor Township, N.J., closed abruptly three years ago, leaving 200 students without a school. Similar problems have been found in Illinois, Wyoming, New York, and Alaska.
My personal favorite is the Prepared Table Charter School in Houston, Texas, at which students were sometimes required to sit on the floor in classrooms because the school couldn’t afford desks. Prepared Table’s principal, the Rev. Harold Wilcox, meanwhile, paid himself over $200,000 annually in salary, while paying his wife over $50,000 a year to be his secretary. (Wilcox also created a three-member “Board of Trustees” for the school, consisting of his wife, his mother-in-law, and himself).
This isn’t a partisan problem. Charter schools have been touted by Democrats and Republicans alike (including Bush and Kerry), but this is a policy problem. Hopefully, reports like the one in today’s NYT will be an eye-opener for policy makers.