Recent editorials from Florida newspapers:
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Feb. 26
Miami Herald on child separation from migrant parents:
Democrats in the U.S. House, now in the majority and flexing their muscle, have long denounced, rightly so, the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, under which adults who illegally crossed the border were criminally prosecuted.
As a result of the misbegotten policy, parents were separated from their children, who could not accompany them to jail.
The policy was the center of attention Tuesday as the House Judiciary Committee held its first hearing to question the people who crafted the controversial policy and those who enforce it. The ultimate goal must be to more quickly unite the children who are in detention with parents or other relatives in this country.
So far, the process has been sluggish, with children and young teens detained indefinitely. That shouldn’t be.
The issue hits home in Miami-Dade County. The Homestead Migrant Child Detention Facility houses 1,600 unaccompanied minors between the ages of 13 and 17 who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Many came without their parents. Others may have been separated from them. This is another problem with what has been a process as haphazard as it has been cruel. It remains unclear just how the children got to this country, clearly making finding parents and other relatives more difficult.
We commend rookie Miami Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a member of the Judiciary Committee and Congressional Hispanic Caucus, for taking the lead. Last week, she brought a congressional delegation to the Homestead facility and left visibly upset at what she saw. “It had a prison-like feeling,” said Mucarsel-Powell, whose district includes Homestead.
The lawmakers held a news conference after the visit and vowed to work to get it shut down. It’s a noble goal. However, their efforts must be rooted in reality. Last month, according to WLRN News, Border Patrol says that it had apprehended more than 5,000 unaccompanied children at the border. Most of them came from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. They have to be housed somewhere.
Lawmakers pledged to work to reunite them with their families already in this country. They would be wise to make this goal their priority.
Tuesday’s hearing was the committee’s first opportunity to grill immigration officials on Capitol Hill over the roll-out and subsequent consequences of the bungled policy. With Democrats in the majority, the House committee now has the teeth and, it is hoped, the bite.
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Online: https://www.miamiherald.com/
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Feb. 27
Tampa Bay Times on a bill that would require county governments, school boards and petition groups to notify the state of intentions to hold referendums on raising taxes:
State Sen. Tom Lee opposed the referendum in Hillsborough County that voters approved in November and raised the local sales tax to pay for transportation improvements. Now the Thonotosassa Republican has filed a bill for the upcoming legislative session that he says addresses serious problems the vote exposed. In reality, the referendum was a model for how citizens can govern themselves and shape their own communities. The petition process is fine, and it doesn’t need any meddling from Tallahassee.
Lee’s bill would require county governments, school boards and petition groups to notify the state of their intention to ask voters to raise taxes at least 180 days before an election. The senator says his intent is to provide a more orderly process for these ballot measures to meet a separate requirement under Florida law that calls for a state audit of programs that would receive this new revenue. He says the two tax measures on the Hillsborough ballot in November that were both approved by voters - one for transportation and another for school improvements - unduly burdened the state’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability, which is required by state law to complete these audits at least 60 days before an election.
This is a solution in search of a problem that ultimately would create a higher hurdle for citizen initiatives to appear on the ballot. The state policy analysis office doesn’t need months to conduct these audits; it farmed out both Hillsborough audits to private-sector accountants, who completed their field work in August in less than two weeks. While the schools referendum edged close to the deadline, officials worked overtime to complete the audit within the time required. The county’s experience last year provides no basis that an earlier deadline is justified or even needed.
Under Lee’s legislation, SB 1040, groups seeking to put a referendum on the ballot also would have to file the required number of signatures with the local elections supervisor at least six months before the election. That reduces the amount of time groups have to gather petitions. Hillsborough’s elections office certified in August that the group behind the transportation referendum, All for Transportation, had submitted the required number of signatures to make the November ballot. Under Lee’s bill, that deadline would have been May. Lee’s bill also requires petition groups to obtain an independent written legal opinion from an attorney “verifying that the proposed referendum complies with state law.” A nonbinding opinion from one attorney is meaningless. It’s another hurdle and expense to citizen groups that does nothing to prevent court challenges down the road.
Contrary to being broken, Hillsborough’s experience shows the system works. Voters followed an established routine for deciding for themselves whether to make key investments in their community. This is another assault on home rule, and the Legislature should be wary of further restricting local control or putting new barriers to the petition process.
Online: http://www.tampabay.com/
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Feb. 25
South Florida Sun Sentinel on public money for private schools:
Gov. Ron DeSantis and most Florida legislators know little about the quality of the private schools into which they’re eager to shovel more public money. That accounts for the flaw in the persistent argument that parents deserve to choose the education for their children. It’s a powerful reason for supporters of public education to resist with every legal means.
If “choice” were more than just gloss, the state would give parents pertinent information to help them choose. But it tells them little beyond the letter grades, from A to F, given public schools. There are no letter grades for private schools, so it is impossible to make useful comparisons with their public counterparts. Neither does the state impose compulsory testing on private schools, other than for low-income students there on Florida’s tax-credit scholarships.
The “choice” that private school advocates extol is deliberately stacked against the public schools.
What the governor and legislature should know, if they’re paying attention, is that scholarship students who returned to the public schools had “substantially lower” test scores than other low-income students who never left. That’s from the annual report of the Learning System Institute at Florida State University for the 2016-2017 school year, which analyzes data for the Department of Education. But it said no conclusion could be drawn because the returnees were more likely to be struggling before they ever left the public schools.
Beyond that limited data, comparative information isn’t the only vacuum in Florida’s private school world. Apart from those who teach the scholarship students, faculty don’t need college degrees and don’t have to be certified in the subjects they teach. They don’t have to follow the curriculum Florida established with the goal of a well-educated population.
These are increasingly glaring issues now that DeSantis wants to enlarge the scholarship programs beyond poor families to those making roughly $68,000 for a family of four - more than double the present limit of $25,750.
Except for some scholarships targeted to children with disabilities, such vouchers have been financed through corporate tax credits - money that never made it to the state treasury. That was to evade the Florida Supreme Court’s decision 13 years ago that public grants to private schools - a key feature of Gov. Jeb Bush’s testing-intensive school overhaul - violate the state constitution’s requirement for a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high-quality system of free public schools.”
The tax-credit pretext no longer brings in enough money, even for the presently eligible poor families who apply, so DeSantis is targeting general revenue.
“If the taxpayer is paying for education, it’s public education,” DeSantis declared at an Orlando private school. That’s Orwellian doublespeak. The private schools he intends to subsidize with vouchers are by their very designation not public.
That means lawsuits, but now that he has appointed three deeply conservative justices to sit with the three already on the Florida Supreme Court, he and his allies are counting on the court to abandon the precedent. One of the new justices came to the court from the employ of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsey DeVos. America’s public schools have never had a worse enemy than her.
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It is unreasonable and unwise for private schools to expect public money without accountability. That’s where “choice” really belongs - between going their own way, as the law allows, or being accountable for the public’s money.
Online: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/
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