More students could soon become eligible for Florida tax credit scholarships, but the numbers don’t lie. The program serves the state’s most disadvantaged students, and that’s likely to remain true as the program expands.
Doug Tuthill, the president of Step Up For Students, lays out the case in this morning’s Gainesville Sun. Step Up helps administer the scholarships, co-hosts this blog and employs the author of this post.
Annual evaluations of the program have repeatedly found students who accept scholarships are among the state’s most disadvantaged. That, Tuthill writes, helps reveal the potential impact of a lawsuit that seeks to end the program.
[T]he tax credit scholarship, created in 2001 and serving 69,846 students in 1,531 private schools last year, is based solely on household income. The average last year was $24,138 in a household of four — roughly 5 percent above poverty. More than half lived with a single parent. Only one in four was white.
Yes, a law that takes effect in 2016 will eventually grant partial scholarships to students whose household income is as high as $62,000. But those partial scholarships can be handed out only after the lower-income students are served first.
So let’s be blunt here. This lawsuit, if it succeeds, would remove nearly 70,000 poor children mostly of color from private schools that are working for them.
Tuthill was responding to a July 5 guest column by retired attorney Carl Ramey, who argued in support of the lawsuit.
“[T]he eligibility ceiling has been increased to include families of four making roughly $62,000 (which, of course, is middle-class territory, not poverty),” Ramey wrote. “And, given the trajectory we’re on (increased spending, matched by increased eligibility limits) who can say it won’t be $75,000 or $100,000 in the near future?”
Read Tuthill’s whole column here, and the earlier column it was responding to here.
