Florida Demonstrates A Rarely Discussed Issue With School Vouchers

School voucher programs present a number of challenges to the tradition of public education in this country, and there are debates aplenty about those issues across the country. But Ron DeSantis has just demonstrated another aspect of a shift to voucher systems that is not often discussed.

This summer, Parents Defending Education, a conservative advocacy group, issued a report claiming that China has infiltrated U.S. classrooms. In the wake of that report, several politicians who use culture and education issues to rile up their voters, have picked up these claims and run with them.

Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Ryan Walters has put Tulsa Public Schools on the defensive by spreading PDE’s allegations. Walters had this summer forced out the TPS superintendent in his bid to have the state take over the school district.

In Florida, Governor DeSantis took another approach. Having determined that four schools that receive state school vouchers have “direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party,” he told the Department of Education to suspend their voucher eligibility.

It’s a stark demonstration of what a voucher system does to local control. In a traditional public school district, the state and the local elected school board both have their hands on the purse strings, but in a voucher system, the state holds every string on that purse.

As DeSantis has just demonstrated, that means the state can cut those purse strings if it sees anything it doesn’t like. School choice fans like to brand public schools as “government schools,” but it turns out that the government has far more control over a voucher school, because it can cut off all funding for any reasons, including reasons of politics.

DeSantis has declared that the alleged connections “constitute an imminent threat to the health, safety, and welfare of these school’s students and the public,” though he does not specify what those threats might be. In today’s climate, it does not take much imagination to come up with other “threats” might be similarly labeled.

It’s a central irony of voucher programs. They’re promoted as a way to reduce state control over education, when in fact they increase it.