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FLORIDA POLITICS
Since 2002, daily Florida political news and commentary

 

UPDATE: Every morning we review and individually digest Florida political news articles, editorials and punditry. Our sister site, FLA Politics was selected by Campaigns & Elections as one of only ten state blogs in the nation
"every political insider should be reading right now."

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Welcome To Florida Politics

Thanks for visiting. On a semi-daily basis we scan Florida's major daily newspapers for significant Florida political news and punditry. We also review the editorial pages and political columnists/pundits for Florida political commentary. The papers we review include: the Miami Herald, Sun-Sentinel, Palm Beach Post, Naples News, Sarasota Herald Tribune, St Pete Times, Tampa Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, the Daytona Beach News-Journal, Tallahassee Democrat, and, occasionally, the Florida Times Union; we also review the political news blogs associated with these newspapers.

For each story, column, article or editorial we deem significant, we post at least the headline and link to the piece; the linked headline always appears in quotes. We quote the headline for two reasons: first, to allow researchers looking for the cited piece to find it (if the link has expired) by searching for the original title/headline via a commercial research service. Second, quotation of the original headline permits readers to appreciate the spin from the original piece, as opposed to our spin.

Not that we don't provide spin; we do, and plenty of it. Our perspective appears in post headlines, the subtitles within the post (in bold), and the excerpts from the linked stories we select to quote; we also occasionally provide other links and commentary about certain stories. While our bias should be immediately apparent to any reader, we nevertheless attempt to link to every article, column or editorial about Florida politics in every major online Florida newspaper.

 

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The Blog for Friday, November 25, 2005

"Jeb!" Shortchanges Public Schools

    From our "education governor":
    When Gov. Bush senses a threat to the education budget, he rushes to counter it — as long as the threat is to the education budget of voucher schools. For the public schools that serve most of Florida's children, Gov. Bush often is the threat to the education budget. ...

    As The Post reported Nov. 16, the governor's office secretly has developed a plan to skirt such a ruling by switching the way the state pays for vouchers that go to disabled students. Rather than take the money directly from the treasury, the state would give corporations that contributed to a private voucher fund a dollar-for-dollar tax break. Whether the courts would let the state get away with such a flimsy technicality is unknown.

    In fact, so-called corporate vouchers already use the tax-break dodge. The Post has reported regularly on abuses that riddle the system, which has almost no financial or academic oversight. An Ocala businessman was convicted of taking nearly $270,000 in corporate voucher money while providing vouchers to zero students. The governor's office has resisted meaningful reform and now is plotting to set up a similarly unaccountable system for another voucher program. We say "plotting" because Gov. Bush's top education aide, Patricia Levesque, for two weeks denied that there was a plan to get around a court ruling.

    Compare the governor's convoluted efforts to protect private voucher schools with his willingness to shortchange regular public schools. The state's share of the education budget has fallen, with local taxpayers forced to kick in more. Even though voters in 2002 approved a class-size amendment that required the state to pay to lower the number of students in each class, Gov. Bush and the Legislature instead have shifted money from other programs, which has led districts to cut or crowd electives and cut aides in the classroom.
    "Help the public schools, not the voucher schools".

6:09 AM

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