Florida school vouchers can pay for Disney tickets and TVs. Is that OK? – Orlando Sentinel Pretty amazing stuff after seeing decades of posts from conservatives about what people do with food stamps lol. Also Disney tickets!
How do the voucher lovers feel about this? And isn't support of Disney a conflict of interest for the FL gov?
I am all for vouchers and completely against this. Don’t care anything about Disney.. don’t like their last round of movies at all but that’s not the issue. Vouchers need to be used for the education of kids.. period .. end of story. This is just stupid.
Vouchers sound good on its face but it has been so abused. How about we fund public schools and let the people who want to go to private schools fund them some other way.
“that taxpayer dollars are being spent on…..Theme park passes, 55-inch TVs, and stand-up paddleboards are among the approved items that recipients can buy to use at home. “teachers often pay out of their own pockets for classroom supplies” “If we saw school districts spending money like that, we would be outraged,” said Damaris Allen, executive director of Families for Strong Public Schools, who recently started speaking out publicly on the issue.”
Vouchers are a money grab and worse. Those who support them are either grabbin' money or lacking a clue.
Sadly no. The schools I work with have already seen parents use this to their advantage across all demographics. Parents are pulling their kids from hood to decent schools and placing them in the cheapest garbage schools and pocketing the money. Not just homeschool parents are abusing the system.
Vouchers offer lots of kids the opportunity at a better education than they were receiving in the public schools. Opportunity is what is all about. Will some abuse it.. yes. We know that and knew that. Just like many abuse the public school system now. Having the choice to improve your kids education a powerful tool and often the only way out of certain cultural lifestyles.
Yes but what if the vouchers are used to purchased 4k tv's to watch Prager U videos in your effort to battle wokeness?
Absolutely, no cultural lifestyle should ever be without Disney theme park passes, 55-inch TVs, and stand-up paddleboards.
Don't be so sensitive. I'm offended by the right wing attacks on education in the U.S., including the horrible push for vouchers and privatization. I'm offended that people are ignorant enough to fall for it, or they just don't care because they have no stake in the game. Vouchers are, have been, and always will be a failure and one that eats away at the quality of public schools. Here's just one recent piece: Research on school vouchers suggests concerns ahead for education savings accounts | Brookings Studies indicate that after traditional voucher expansions, the private school market floods with new pop-up providers. That’s exactly what is happening with the ESA-style expansions in Arizona now. Many new schools are nearly or entirely funded by the ESA payments—just as the average private school in older voucher programs was. Many of these schools will quickly close. There’s also existing academic evidence predicting that traditional voucher programs incentivize existing private schools to raise tuition, using the new dollars as something of a public subsidy. And that is exactly what recent reports are showing with ESA passage, with existing private schools raising their tuition. Part of the push for ESA vouchers comes from the lingering frustration over the pandemic-era school closures and concern over learning loss as measured by standardized tests. But on that question, the last decade of research on traditional vouchers strongly suggests they actually lower academic achievement. In Louisiana, for example, two separate research teams found negative academic impacts as high as -0.4 standard deviations—extremely large by education policy standards—with declines that persisted for years. Those results were published across top journals for empirical public and education policy. Similar results in Indiana found impacts closer to -0.15 standard deviations. To put these negative impacts in perspective: Current estimates of COVID-19’s impact on academic trajectories hover around -0.25 standard deviations. There is mixed evidence on whether traditional vouchers improve educational attainment (high school graduation or college enrollment). Studies range from large positive impacts to none whatsoever. And these indicate whatever advantage may exist is driven by those who remain in a private high school all four years. That’s a huge caveat: In research on Milwaukee’s program, my team found not only rates of student exit approaching 20% annually, but also that those former voucher students saw academic improvements once returning to public schools. Other work in Florida and Indiana found exit rates similarly high. And related to the fraudulent spending in FL . . . A major concern with today’s ESAs is accountability or oversight on both spending and academic outcomes. On the one hand, when the dismal Louisiana and Indiana voucher results came out, a major talking point among voucher advocates attributed that academic harm to “over-regulation.” On the other, the only empirical evidence of the effects of accountability on a voucher program found that once voucher schools were required to use the same testing and reporting requirements as their public counterparts, voucher performance improved substantially. The lack of accountability is already raising problems in newer programs. In Arizona, for example, families had a number of questionable expenses approved, and in North Carolina, some private schools are claiming more vouchers than students actually enrolled.
