Tax Credit Scholarships

Florida scholarships help poorer kids

For anyone who supported Ontario’s now defunct Education Tax Credit this St. Petersburg Times article will make you wish it still existed. 

This Florida program is helping 23,400 low-income students.  The tax credit scholarship amounts to about $1,000 ($US).  The average family income of the students is $25,000 for a family of four.  Two-thirds of the students are visible minorities and three-fifths are from single-parent families.

“We hear moms tell us their children to longer fake illness to avoid school, that their children don’t get into fights anymore, and that they are doing homework and setting goals for the first time. We see promising schools such as Miami Union Academy, which has achieved a graduation rate of 96 percent and college placement of 90 percent with largely poor Haitian students. Or Yvonne Reed Christian School in St. Petersburg, run by a 34-year public school veteran who started her own school because she was determined to make sure young black males could read.“

It seems to School For Thought that the cost of running such a program in Ontario would have been a lot less than the costs of implementing class size caps or ineffective reading programs that do not translate into significant achievement gains.

For opponents to such a plan, the words of Dr. Howard Fuller come to mind:

“Those of us with money have the capacity to choose and the great hypocrisy that operates are those individuals who would never put their own children in certain schools denying poor parents the capacity to do it. We have teachers who teach in schools they would never put their own children in, demanding that other peoples’ children stay there. I find that to be hypocritical.

I actually happen to be a strong supporter of public schools, but I’m also a strong supporter of giving people a choice so that they can determine whether a public school or private school will be best for their children…It is ludicrous for us not to provide a way for kids to go to schools that work because at the end of the day a democracy can’t sustain itself unless it has an educated populace.“

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