On Wednesday, we’ll find out what the Tax Credit Scholarship Program is really all about

During Wednesday morning’s House PreK-12 Innovation Subcommittee meeting, we’ll find out what the Tax Credit Scholarship Program is really all about.

If the leaders of the program are serious about giving every child the best possible chance to succeed, then the meeting will include proposals for serious reforms that will address the safety issues faced by a significant number of the program’s students and blunt the temptation to place students in so-called “learning environments” that amount to educational solitary confinement with students assigned to their own individual partitions without access to qualified teachers.

Such reforms might replicate the successful oversight structure that Florida’s Catholic schools have.  A recent report showed that the state’s Catholic schools are among the schools having the most success with tax credit scholarship students.

If the primary motivation behind the tax credit scholarship program is instead ideological, then the meeting’s participants will be reading from a very different script.  We will hear that all parents are born with all the knowledge they need to make the very best educational decisions for their children.  (Really?? I wasn’t.)  Perhaps we will be treated to the revelation that somebody smart has created an app to solve all of the tax credit scholarship program’s problems.

Are tax credit scholarship students simply a means to an ideological end?  We will do the experiment to test that hypothesis on Wednesday morning.

Meanwhile, my regular readers (I suspect I’m back down to two of them) might enjoy the graph below.  It shows that the tax credit scholarship program is responsible for all of the growth in Florida’s private school sector since 2012-13.  All of the numbers came from the Florida Department of Education web site.