Florida House Bill 1 (again, more, very long, but public ed is worth saving, so...)

[Timeflyer]

Last edited Mon Feb 13, 2023, 12:20 PM - Edit history (1)

FLORIDA, House Bill 1 (from Support Our Schools organization)

House bill 1 (HB 1) "School Choice," a Florida House and Senate bill that dramatically expands enrollment in private schools at public expense is called "historic" by its supporters, who claim that FL students will no longer be locked into "failing schools." The say that "ESAs", Educational Savings Accounts, central to BH 1, provide parents with educational options and flexibility. But critics fire back that HB 1 will destroy public education by eventually bankrupting public school districts.

What is HB 1?

This bill is modeled on Arizona legislation that passed in June 2022. It takes an existing school voucher program, the FES, Family Empowerment Scholarship, and make it universal. This means that all parents of students who live in Florida and and are eligible to enroll in K-12 public schools can receive close to $8K per year to attend a private school. It also opens the $8K payment to hundreds of thousands of students already enrolled in private school, including children of millionaires and even billionaires, as there are no longer any income caps. A Florida Senate companion bill, SB 202, was filed on Feb. 10, 2023.

What else is included in HB 1?

HB1 is a comprehensive bill that radically restructures and transforms the current voucher-based FL scholarship programs into ESAs, Educational Savings Accounts that can be spent on a variety of programs, goods and services. Along with paying for private school, HB 1 legislation:

· expands the use of FES to include the purchase of instructional materials, curriculum, contracted services, including part-time attendance at a public or private school, and other approved expenditures,

· allows up to $24K to accumulate in an ESA, which upon graduation can be used for higher education costs,

· includes homeschooled students--up to 10,000 of the 150,000 Florida homeschooled students in the first year, increasing to 20,00 in subsequent years and leaving to an eventual removal of the cap,

· expands the number of students with disabilities receiving FES-Unique Abilities, already utilizing ESA, from 1% to 3% of Florida ESE student population to eliminate the current FES-UA wait list.

Who supports HB1?

Gov. Ron DeSantis has made HB 1 a top priority of his "education freedom" agenda that also includes attacking teacher unions, furthering cultural war attacks, and making school board races partisan. HB 1 has the enthusiastic backing of both Speaker of the Fl House Paul Renner and Senate President K. Passidomo. The legislation is supported by Charles Koch, who has been pushing for ESAs for many years through his Americans for Prosperity organization. It also has the support of Betsy Devos' American Federation for Children, and Jeb Bush's ExcelinEd.

Who opposes HB 1?

HB 1 is opposed by the Florida Education Association, the Florida League of Women Voters, Support Our Schools, the Florida Democratic Public Education Caucus, and many other grassroots groups. Sally Butzin of the Florida League of Women Voters said of HB 1, “it takes a sledgehammer to education,” thereby attacking the “bedrock of democracy.”

Is an ESA (Educational Savings Account) the same as a voucher?

Some people call ESAs “super vouchers,” but, while they have many things in common, like lack of transparency and accountability, a voucher and an ESA are structurally different. Vouchers are a narrow mechanism that fund private schools, while ESAs fund an array of programs, products and services. In Florida all the ESA options are placed on a marketplace models after Amazon.

In some states an actual ESA debit card is provided, but in Florida the educational savings accounts are managed by a nonprofit, called “Step Up for Students”, and “purchases” are debited from the account. An ESA allows the money to follow the child. If done on a broad, system-wide scale, as many supporters of ESAs envision, all “public” schools and programs could be placed on the marketplace as a separate entity, thus destroying public education. Since the funding follows the student, it makes constitutional legal challenges much harder.

If ESA create options and flexibility for students, isn’t that a good thing?

Quality education is student centered and individualized. While there are some excellent private schools that do this, many of the private schools that accept vouchers are more hype than educational substance, and are often undercapitalized. For example: in Sarasota County, of the 37 private schools that accept vouchers, more than half are religious schools, and some of these schools teach a highly rote biblical curriculum. Some, like the Sarasota Classical Academy, which is affiliated with Hillsdale College, use curricula filled with historical distortions and untruths. Some of the schools discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community. Private schools have few regulations and can hire teachers with no formal education if they can demonstrate a “special skill.”

A series of articles entitled Schools Without Rules in the Orlando Sentinel exposed many shortcomings, and charged that these schools were neither transparent nor accountable. Other studies on school privatization document how public schools consistently outperform private schools. Even the best of the voucher-funded private schools generally perform no better than public schools, frequently performing worse, and on average students return to public schools within 2 years.

How much will it cost to fund HB 1?

The Florida Policy Institute (FPI) and the Education Law Center (ELS) analyzed the bill’s economics. They determined that HB1 will cost a staggering $4 billion in its initial year of implementation. That is more than 17% of the current education budget, a huge reduction, made worse by Florida’s already bottom-of-the-barrel spending. The cost to taxpayers breaks down as follows:
· $1.1 billion for 124,063 students currently receiving FES vouchers,
· $890 million for 104,477 new FES enrollees once the family income cap is lifted,
· $1.9 billion for 219,017 new FES ESAs for current private school students newly eligible for ESAs,
· $85 million for 10,000 new FES ESAs for homeschooled students newly eligible for ESAs.

Where will the money come from?

Currently the legislators are mum on this. The Florida House staff analysis says, “the bill would have an indeterminate fiscal impact,” depending on the participation rate and additional state funding. When asked how HB 1 would be funded, the bill’s sponsor, Representative Kaylee Tuck, (R, district 55) said the bill would be “revenue neutral.”
But that is not the case, as children already attending private schools or being homeschooled are not in the system. In addition, children who leave public schools for private schools, or to be homeschooled, are being removed by ones and twos, from multiple classrooms, grades, and schools throughout the district, so little is gained in economy of scale. That the Florida Department of Education did not compensate schools when FES vouchers were paid out of general revenue last year, costing Sarasota $17.3 million in reduced state aid. This fact provides a clue that this might be repeated, even though the increase this coming year is expected to be more than three-fold higher.

How will HB 1 effect the funding of public education in Sarasota County?

The FPI and ELC did a county-by-county analysis of the costs, assuming no additional state funds. The figure for Sarasota County is quite startling, with researchers estimating that it will cost Sarasota $60.1 million next year (2023-24). That is 70% of the state aid that Sarasota receives—one of the highest percentages in the state. And that amount is nearly 16% of Sarasota County Schools operating budget. And that is just for the first year of implementation.

What are the implications of HB 1 for the future of public education in Florida?

Public education supporters view universal ESAs as the death knell of Florida public education. Since 1999, when Gov. Jeb Bush began implementing privatization policies, Florida has been the nation’s leader in privatization, occasionally bested by Arizona.
Gov. DeSantis’ education commissioners, both previous commissioner Richard Corcoran and current commissioner Manny Diaz, have set up a full-fledged privatizing apparatus. Corcoran worked with the legislature to create an outside authorizer, located with the Florida DOE, to by-pass local school boards, which allows easy approval for largely for-profit managed charter schools. This year, Diaz transformed the voucher system into universal ESAs. With those two reforms, Florida can now easily ramp up to full education privatization.

For more information and resources:

HB 1: https://edlawcenter.org/news/archives/school-funding-national/hb1-universal-voucher-program-would-cost-billions.html

Public Education: https://networkforpubliceducation.org/privatization-toolkit/

ESAs: https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Do-Education-Savings-Accounts-lead-to-better-results-for-families-.pdf

School Privatization: https://networkforpubliceducation.org/fight-privatization/

Chartered for Profit: https://networkforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Charted-for-Profit-II.pdf

[Phoenix61]

1. Imagine what he could accomplish on a national level. nt

He really needs to be stopped. We have to get the house back and keep the senate.

[Sancho]

2. A lot of DeSatan's stuff comes from conservative outsiders, but he's their trumpet

[FloridaBlues]

3. This is a go ahead for other red states to implement to dismantle

public education.