Florida Judiciary Runs Amok – Yet Again
Ever since they attempted to steal the 2000 Presidential election and give Gorons cover for accusing President Bush of doing the same, stories about the Florida Supreme “Court” acting more like the Supreme Soviet are becoming so commonplace that the usual “dog bites man” analogy doesn’t do it justice. As common as it may be for dogs to bite men, it’s infinitely more common for them not to, so maybe “dog wags tail and doesn’t bite man” is the better analogy here. Anyway, as commonplace as such power-grabs have become, it is worth noting that that they’ve done it again, this time to protect “public” schools from … you guessed it … the public. Baseball Crank has the goods.
UPDATE: Ravnwood sums up Florida “law” nicely: All schools must equally suck.
January 6th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
Just remember, you can’t spell “scofflaw” without “SC of FLA.”
January 6th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Nice!
January 7th, 2006 at 9:56 am
So, language that was put in to make sure that no non-Protestant schools ever received state funding, didn’t seem to prevent Jim Crow segregation, and doesn’t prevent decrepit schools or mediocre education performance, is now hauled out from the legal wastebin and used to protect the school bureaucracy from the rigors of competition.
Seems like the Florida legislature has some housecleaning to do.
January 8th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
Seems like the Florida legislature has some housecleaning to do.
Even if they do it, I’m not convinced SCOFLA would acknowledge the changes. They seem to regard actual legislation as mere suggestions — and contemptible ones at that.
January 10th, 2006 at 12:22 pm
Kevin:
I’m confused about this bit. Presumably you’re referring to the “Blaine amendment,” but that wasn’t cited in the decision, was it?
And it seems to me that you’re starting to sound like one of those lib’rul “living constitutionists” — if you don’t like the clause in the constitution, isn’t the correct course of action supposed to be to change the constitution, rather than just to ignore those clauses we don’t like?
January 10th, 2006 at 12:25 pm
And in any case, Ravnwood’s summation, while funny, isn’t quite right. All public schools must equally suck. Parents are still free to homeschool, or to put their kids in private or parochial school; they just have to do this without the government’s financial assistance. You’d think fiscal conservatives would actually like this.
On the voucher thing, one thing I’ve always wondered is why isn’t this being done on a large scale privately? Why hasn’t some well-funded think tank set up its own voucher program, non-profit and free of government expense or intervention, to prove that vouchers actually work?
After all, if government bureaucracy is what kills public schools, how is superimposing government bureaucracy onto private schools going to help? If you keep the whole thing private, won’t it work better?
January 10th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
If the “court” had merely ruled that all government schools are required to suck equally, I wouldn’t be complaining about the decision. Where they went off the deep end was in holding that allowing any real competition from non-government schools that don’t suck would automatically undermine the state’s ability to keep all government schools equally sucky.
Given the relative efficiency of private schools, I fail to see why fiscal conservatives should prefer a system that corrals everyone into overpriced, underfunctioning government schools, at taxpayer expense, over one that at least allows the recipients to choose between spending all of their aid at a government school, or half of it at a private one.
Finally, cost is an obvious problem for trying to emulate vouchers on a private scale. That private schools generally function better than government ones is almost too obvious to be worth proving; what needs to be proved is that a choice system can work for the unwashed masses liberals claim to care so much about. A small, pilot program paid for by private funds would almost certainly be written off as “elitist” and meaningless, just as existing scholarship programs are. On the other hand, if liberals really believe that vouchers won’t work, why do they insist on suing everybody to prevent them from being tried at all? Why not pick one state to allow a 5 year “vouchers for all” (i.e., all who want them) program for five years, with a sunset clause? That way, the government school unions can prove once and for all what a horrible disaster school vouchers are, and no one will ever push for them again. Either that, or …