In Florida, school choice should not exist without school accountability | Opinion

The Florida House on Monday passed legislation that will greatly expand school vouchers in our state. I was proud to stand in opposition to this misguided bill, which will hurt public-school students and does nothing to improve accountability within the existing voucher programs.

The debate in the Florida Legislature regarding the lack of protections afforded LGBTQ students from discrimination is a discussion worth continuing. Opponents of such protections, including some within my own Democratic Party, consistently raise concerns related to the limitations such anti-discrimination measures may have on student opportunities and choice, particularly for African-American students.

As the father of two children, nothing is more important to my wife and me than ensuring that our children receive every possible opportunity to achieve their greatest potential.

That means ensuring the schools we send them to are accountable to us as parents and that they are transparent in the metrics they are using to measure our children’s achievement.

Unfortunately, thousands of schools in Florida, receiving more than $1 billion in public tax dollars, are not being held to the levels of rigorous accountability that children and their parents deserve.

Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship program, as well as the new Family Empowerment Scholarships created last year, divert almost 130,000 students out of the traditional public-school system and into private schools each year.

This means that for almost 10 percent of children in Florida, they are attending schools where their teachers are not required to be certified; the curriculum is not monitored or held accountable to the Department of Education’s standards; their classes may be held in strip malls or buildings where inspection records for fire safety may have been forged by administrators; and they may face open discrimination from administrators and other school personnel.

Because of this lack of oversight, many parents are left in the dark when choosing what school will best fit their child.

And if all that were not bad enough, the little data we do have on the academic achievement of students in these schools is extremely discouraging.

Four recent studies by the Learning Systems Institute at Florida State University on “Participation, Compliance and Test Scores” show a disturbing downward trend in academic achievement for students within the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program.

In Miami-Dade County, there are 79 schools participating in the Tax Credit Scholarship program. Of those schools, 54.43 percent showed no academic gains over the three-year period studied that ended in 2017-2018.

That’s simply unacceptable.

Proponents of Florida’s voucher system like to make many promises to parents about the effectiveness of the schools participating. They also paint those who seek to keep the focus on public schools as mean-spirited opponents of choice for parents and who are working to deny opportunities to children they cannot receive anywhere else.

This could not be further from the truth.

There should be nothing controversial about ensuring that the continued diversion of billions of tax dollars a year away from traditional public schools that educate 90 percent of our children are resulting in academic gains. The continued lack of accountability and transparency for these schools must end.

As the son of a public-school teacher, I understand the unique challenges and the overwhelming amount of work education professionals put in on behalf of their students and the parents who put their trust in them.

It is time to put all of our schools on a level playing field. We regularly impose accountability and transparency requirements on our traditional public schools. We should demand nothing less from those schools participating in the state’s voucher programs.

No one is saying that parents shouldn’t have a choice in how their children are educated.

What we are saying is that choice must be meaningful.

Javier Fernandez is the state pepresentative for District 114 in the Florida House.