I am not a fan of vouchers for private schooling, for a lot of reasons. One is the lack of oversight of private schools set up specifically to take advantage of voucher funds.
The Miami New Times has published an extensive expose of on-going fraud in an article by Gus Garcia-Roberts McKay scholarship program sparks a cottage industry of fraud and chaos (published Thursday, Jun 23 2011).
It's like a perverse science experiment, using disabled school kids as lab rats and funded by nine figures in taxpayer cash: Dole out millions to anybody calling himself an educator. Don't regulate curriculum or even visit campuses to see where the money is going.
For optimal results, do this in Florida, America's fraud capital.
Now watch all the different ways the flimflam men scramble for the cash.
Once a niche scholarship fund, the McKay program has boomed exponentially in the 12 years since it was introduced under Gov. Jeb Bush, with $148.6 million handed out in the past 12 months, a 38 percent increase from just more than five years ago.
There are 1,013 schools — 65 percent of them religious — collecting McKay vouchers from 22,198 children at an average of $7,144 per year.
Previously here:
- June 14, 2004 Dyslexia School Scandal in Florida
- July 3, 2004 Florida Voucher Trainwreck
- August 4 2004 Latest in Florida Voucher Trainwreck
- August 24, 2006 McKay Voucher Fraud in Florida
- August 27, 2006 Another Florida Voucher Trainwreck
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