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The basic sequence of events is fairly straightforward.
The Orlando Sentinel published an investigative report revealing that a large number of schools receiving vouchers through Florida’s Step Up for Students program were openly discriminating against LGBTQ students. SUFS is part of a tax credit scholarship, a program that lets donors give money to private schools in place of paying their taxes, via a middleman organization that collects the contributions and distributes scholarships— that’s SUFS’s role. In a particular bitter piece of irony, one of the scholarship programs that SUFS runs is one for students who are bullied.
The Sentinel followed its report with an editorial directed at corporations that aim to be LGBTQ friendly, but who also contribute to the voucher program. The donor list is not hard to find; folks began calling out the companies, and some pulled out of the program. The dominoes continue to fall, and now several donors have announced they won’t support the program unless changes are made.
There are several lessons to be learned (or re-learned) here.
Supporters of the Florida program will argue that no taxpayer dollars are involved, and that is technically correct. But every dollars that goes to the tax credit program is a dollar that doesn’t go into the state treasury, which mans taxpayers will either have their taxes raised to replace it, or they will do without whatever that dollar would have bought.
Research for this story didn’t involve going undercover; just reading the school’s materials. They are private schools, and that means they are free to exclude, reject, or otherwise discriminate against students. The fact that they were receiving public taxpayer dollars didn’t changed that. All the “choice” programs in the world do not change the fact that private schools get to do the choosing—not parents. Florida has no laws safeguarding LGBTQ rights.
If these had been actual public schools, there would have been several avenues available to deal with the discrimination. Affected families could have involved the courts. Parents could contact state or federal officials. Elected school board members could face pressure from their community, including facing tough fights in the next election. Instead, the only available action has to be taken by corporations, some of whom are not based in the same state.
It’s worth noting that Step Up for Students may decide to ignore the corporate donor defections and make do with the contributions that remain. In which case the taxpayers will continue to foot the bill for schools that discriminate, and there’s not anything at all they can do about it.
School choice advocates like to talk about parent power and market forces. But neither of those means anything in this instance. Parents of LGBTQ students have no power over the offending schools, and they have no opportunity to “vote with their feet.” The power goes with control of the purse strings, and the purse strings reside in various corporate offices across the country. Not with the community, not with the parents, not with elected officials. In this arrangement, the parents are not the customers—the customers, the people who are paying for a service, are the donors.
Those corporate offices are now trying to dictate education policy for these schools. We’re not upset because we happen to think they’re correct, but what if they were threatening to withhold funding over some more objectionable policy. Most have stated that they will resume their support of SUFS when the exclusionary policies are changed—but what are the implications of schools where policy is set by bank officers in headquarters far across the country?
Remember, too, that if these corporations are so deeply concerned about the health of the community, they could just pay their taxes instead of using the education tax scholarship to dodge them.
This use of vouchers to fund religious private schools is the subject of Espinoza v. Montana, a case for which the Supreme Court just heard arguments. Should SCOTUS decide in favor of religious school vouchers, what we’re seeing in Florida will become a more widespread issue.
Finally, when you read about Betsy DeVos touting her “Education Freedom” program, and when you hear Donald Trump pushing that program (reportedly it will be featured in the State of the Union address), remember that it is a national version of this program in Florida. It’s a program that allows the wealthy to fund exclusionary private schools as a way to dodge paying taxes, and leaves private schools answering not to the public, the parents or the taxpayers, but to their wealthy patrons.
