A few weeks ago, the Orlando Sentinel reported that a teacher at a local voucher school had been accused of soliciting sexually explicit videos from one of his students.
The story was troubling, but far from the first for Winners Primary School, which received more than $1.2 million in tax dollars and tax credits last year to run a voucher school out of an old Target store on West Colonial Drive.
Winners Primary also employed a teacher who had lost her certification to teach after being sent to prison for Medicaid fraud and another teacher who was pressured to leave Orange County Public Schools after twice grabbing a kindergartner.
The Sentinel has also found other local voucher schools hiring high school dropouts as teachers. Yes, people teaching school who never finished school themselves.
You might wonder: Why on earth would a parent send their kids to a school that hired unqualified teachers?
Maybe because the parents don’t know.
See, in Florida “school choice” means voucher schools can choose to hire teachers without degrees and also choose to keep that information secret.
The schools are a black hole of accountability funded by more than $1 billion of tax credits and tax dollars.
We still don’t know if the teacher most recently accused of soliciting videos did something wrong. He hasn’t been convicted or even charged with a crime.
But we also don’t know whether he’s even qualified to teach. As the Sentinel’s Leslie Postal reported, the only document we got from the state listed his qualifications as “N/A.”
Regardless of whether that means not available or not applicable, what it should mean is not acceptable.
Parents and taxpayers deserve to know whether teachers who get paid with state money are qualified to do the job — the same way they can check on qualifications for public schools.
Unfortunately, lawmakers don’t demand accountability. Some don’t even understand the rules.
A few months ago, when the Sentinel’s editorial board was conducting interviews with legislative candidates, state Rep. Rene Plasencia R-Orlando, insisted that the Sentinel was wrong in reporting that some voucher teachers lack certifications or degrees.
“You guys were getting something wrong consistently over and over again,” he said.
It was like hearing someone tell you that a cat is a dog. We knew he was wrong. So we asked him to explain.
Plasencia then read part of a state statute that says voucher-school teachers are required to have college degrees or three years of teaching experience.
That was true. But then I suggested Plasencia read the rest of the sentence in that statute — the part that says they must have those things or “have special skills, knowledge, or expertise that qualifies them to provide instruction in subjects taught.”
That, my friends, is a loophole big enough for a Mack truck. Voucher schools can claim any old life experience qualifies as “special skills” or “knowledge” — which is why we have dropouts teaching.
Plasencia finally conceded: “I guess there could be potentially someone who doesn’t have a high school diploma … “
There’s no guessing. There are. We’ve found them.
Still, Plasencia then claimed the “overwhelming majority” of voucher teachers are qualified and excellent.
“How do you know that?” asked Opinion editor Mike Lafferty. “They don’t have to report this information.”
That’s when Plasencia said we were wrong again — that these schools have to report such information to the state and that anyone can find this information.
Again, I knew he was wrong. The Sentinel newsroom has spent years trying to determine teacher qualifications at voucher schools, only to be rebuffed.
But when you cover politics, you sometimes have to prove that water is wet and the sky is blue.
So I sent the Florida Department of Education an email and asked for a list of the teacher qualifications at six local voucher schools — including Winners Primary and Esther’s School in Osceola, where our reporters had previously found two teachers who lacked high school diplomas.
Here was the response from the spokeswoman for the Department of Education:
“Hello Scott. As you know, per state law we are not required to collect the information you requested.”
Yes, nice spokeswoman, I do know that.
It’d be nice if the people who write the laws of this state knew that as well.
It’d be even nicer if they tried to do something about it.
I forwarded the education department’s statement to Plasencia … twice. He never responded.
In some ways, I don’t blame Plasencia, who used to be a public school teacher himself, for assuming that all teachers at Florida’s publicly funded schools are provably qualified. That’s what any normal person who believes in accountability would assume.
But normal people who believe in accountability don’t run the Florida Legislature.
Republican leaders, and some Democrats, argue they don’t need all these pesky accountability rules — that the best check and balance for school choice is choice itself; unhappy parents can simply switch schools.
Except that doesn’t do anything to ensure that taxpayers are actually funding meaningful education. And it ignores the point that many parents don’t even know about the unqualified teachers because the state doesn’t require them to disclose that information.
Now that Plasencia knows that, maybe he can persuade his peers to do something about it.
I believe in school choice. But I also believe in accountability. And there’s no good reason to let publicly funded schools hire unqualified teachers — or hide that information.
