If the Florida Restaurant Association ever detects a shortage of chefs in our state, the first place it should look for prospective Italian restaurant trainees is among school choice critics.
That’s because school choice critics have spent the last few years “throwing spaghetti against the wall,” hoping some new criticism of Florida’s very popular scholarship programs might stick.
First, they raised concerns about parents using their flexible scholarship dollars to purchase items like paddleboards that the critics said lacked educational value. But this complaint fell apart when some physical education instructors pointed out that paddleboards are sometimes used with special-needs children to help them develop better balance. (It’s better to fall in water than on hard ground.)
So, the school choice critics then launched a massive “hassle-the-parents” campaign to make scholarship recipients file monthly – yes, monthly! – reports that serve no other purpose than to confirm, “We want to remain in the program.” The teacher unions and other critics claim these monthly reports are necessary to curb “double-counting” of students.
But this criticism is falling apart, as some tech-savvy observers point out that a digital fix to the double-counting problem would make far more sense. The tech-solution proponents are pushing back against the “hassle-the-parents” campaign with a message Pink Floyd would surely appreciate: “Hey, teacher unions – leave them kids’ parents alone!”
Now, the school choice opponents have concocted their most curious criticism yet. They’ve started sounding the alarm that scholarship families are – get this – failing to spend all the money allotted to them.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars have been sitting unspent in so-called scholarship accounts where they could have been funding our public schools,” Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith complained at a recent Committee hearing.
What Smith and his fellow school choice opponents fail to understand is that temporarily unused funds in scholarship accounts are a feature, not a bug. These monies aren’t permanently unused funds – they’re rollover funds. They’re dollars parents have chosen to defer for later use, knowing that the cost of K-12 education and college often increases as children get older.
Interestingly, parents’ freedom to roll over scholarship funds for future use has a significant benefit for the entire K-12 marketplace. It means schools can’t set artificially high tuition prices, as we often see with “use-it-all-now-or-lose-it-forever” programs. In essence, rollover freedom gives families an incentive to shop for K-12 education the same way they shop for everything else – seeking the highest possible quality at the lowest possible price.
As such, this program feature is the taxpayers’ best friend. It rewards the efficient use of K-12 dollars. And it helps demonstrate that a high-quality education often can be attained for less than the cost of a public-school education, which helps explain why the unions so vigorously oppose K-12 market competition.
Rather than embracing Smith’s effort to eliminate rollover funds, the Legislature ought to go in the complete opposite direction. It should expand rollover fund options to include small business startup costs for K-12 graduates. That way, if Junior wants to launch a small business after high school instead of going to college, he could use some of the K-12 monies he saved taxpayers to get his enterprise off the ground.
The school choice critics likely won’t like that idea. But if lawmakers expand scholarship spending options in this way, someday soon we may see one or more of our state’s K-12 graduates using their rollover funds to start an Italian restaurant, where they can hire an out-of-work school choice critic to be the chef.
