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Governor's Power Can't Save Vouchers

Posted on: Monday, 9 January 2006, 09:00 CST

By S.V. DATE Palm Beach Post Capital Bureau

For seven years, the power of Gov. Jeb Bush's personality and the strength of his will were enough to push his vision of private school vouchers in Florida.

He twisted arms and, when needed, cussed out skeptical lawmakers to make them pass his Opportunity Scholarships in 1999. He worked behind the scenes to help pass two even larger voucher plans over the next two years. He used the built-in deference for state government to stay the effect of negative court rulings for an additional five years.

But on Thursday, Bush's political power was no longer enough. In 9,000 words and 35 pages, five of the seven justices of the Florida Supreme Court undid the national standing Bush had won for the state in the "school choice" universe.

Bush and the legislature, the majority ruled, simply do not have the authority to create a private-school voucher program outside of the "uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality system of free public schools." And although the ruling technically applied only to the 733 students in Bush's failing-school voucher program, the sweeping language made even voucher advocates worry that it provides the legal basis to stop the two other programs, which between them have 29,641 students.

Bush, who calls vouchers a keystone of his "A-plus" education plan that rewards and punishes public schools according to their annual grade, said he and his staff are still considering their options. Last year, his top education aide had secretly started drafting legislation to save both the failing-school vouchers and the McKay vouchers for disabled students. But that proposal was crafted to counter a ruling striking vouchers on church-state issues, not on the broader grounds that the justices wound up adopting.

"We will calmly go about making the determination of what the strategy will be," Bush said, but acknowledged that he did not yet have one.

Sen. Jim King, the Jacksonville Republican who for three years has led the legislative fight to bring more "accountability" to vouchers, said that a strong ruling from the court could well spell the end. "When they say 'no,' that is supposed to be taken for a 'no,' not a maybe."

Focus on poor children

That Bush pushed so hard for school vouchers when he took office in 1999 was not a surprise, given his track record.

In 1991, as a Miami businessman, Bush was co-chair of Floridians for Educational Choice, a pro-voucher group. In 1993, he helped raise money for privately funded scholarships for poor children.

In his 1994 unsuccessful run for governor, Bush started out advocating vouchers for all parents who wanted one, but later said that vouchers should first go to children in under-performing schools.

That became the basis of his 1998 run, combined with annual testing of students to determine school scores. Bush said during that campaign that all he wanted was for poor and minority students to have the same opportunities for private school educations as wealthy students have. It is an emphasis Bush has maintained through the years, including in his news conference Thursday to discuss the court ruling, where he pointed out that 94 percent of the recipients of the vouchers were black or Hispanic.

Indeed, the emphasis on poor children was a key element of the new strategy the national voucher movement formally adopted in 2000 at a meeting in Grand Rapids, Mich. Wealthy white business leaders like Amway's Rich DeVos and Tampa's John Kirtley decided that focusing on poor, black children would help the movement win access to taxpayer dollars, rather than merely private donations.

Kirtley was able to sell the proposal almost immediately in Florida, thanks to a $100,000 donation to the state Republican Party that autumn, and got lawmakers the next spring to push through the corporate tax-credit vouchers so that poor children could attend private schools.

Building voucher support

Shows of massive support, in fact, were key to the strategy from the beginning. The idea was to get as many students taking vouchers as possible, as soon as possible. That way, if the courts started ruling against vouchers, supporters would be able to show the news media large numbers of children who would be hurt by the legal challenges.

In June, when the one legal challenge to date finally arrived at the Florida Supreme Court, Kirtley and his backers were prepared with 2,000 children and parents, again bused from all over the state, to let the justices know how they felt.

But if the justices were intimidated, they did not show it, immediately ripping into pro-voucher lawyer Barry Richard about where the legislature found the authority in the constitution to fund anything other than public schools. Richard answered that the legislature had "plenary authority" to do so - the same answer he had given the court when explaining why then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris had the discretion to accept or not accept election results during the 2000 election recount.

The justices responded to Richard the same way in the voucher ruling as they did in the election case: They decided he was wrong.

Comply, or circumvent?

Which leaves Bush with only the upcoming legislative session to craft a response to the politically volatile voucher issue in an election year that will determine his successor.

By Friday, GOP legislative leaders were still analyzing the ruling to see what, if any, avenues remain to let them salvage the failing-school vouchers and buttress the others.

"The court ruling may not have left a lot of latitude," Senate President Tom Lee said. "Whatever we do, we will do within the confines of the constitution or attempts to amend it."

King said he found it ironic that in the ruling, Chief Justice Barbara Pariente listed, point by point, all the ways in which the vouchers lacked the certified teachers, the curriculum standards and the criminal background checks that are required of public schools as proof of how the voucher system created a "nonuniform" alternative. King for three years has pushed for more accountability standards for voucher schools, but was stopped by Bush and his allies, who wanted looser standards.

"Who will ever know what the Supreme Court decision could have been had we three years ago stepped into the program and said: These things need to be changed?" King said.

King said he also wondered whether it was time for Republicans to comply with the court ruling.

"Is it our role, now that the court has ruled, to implement the dismantling of the voucher system? Or do we try to circumvent it? Or do we wait for someone to challenge the other two programs?"

It appears unlikely he will find the sentiment to dismantle anything from his counterparts in the House, where Speaker Allan Bense read the decision as applying only to the failing school vouchers, and not either of the other two programs, spokesman Towson Fraser said.

And that attitude, said the lawyer for voucher opponents, could be just what spurs his teachers union client to decide in coming weeks to go ahead and file challenges to the other two programs, as well.

"If they're going to pull out all the stops, if they're going to look for gimmicks to get around the ruling, then that may well color the decision of those groups that have come this far to want to take it the rest of the way," Ron Meyer said.

s_v_date@pbpost.com

Source: Palm Beach Post

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