About 1 in 4 Florida students have given up vouchers

MIAMI -- More than one in four students who took a voucher to attend private school in Florida this semester have transferred back to public education, a newspaper reported.

This summer, 607 students requested taxpayer-funded vouchers to leave public schools that received failing grades. As of last week, 170 had returned to public schools, The Miami Herald reported Sunday.

In one county, Miami-Dade, 90 of 330 students who requested vouchers have returned to public school -- and more than two in three were back in their original school.

Many returning students said they felt more comfortable at their neighborhood schools, even those labeled as failing. They also cited trouble with transportation, and more demanding curricula or firmer discipline at their new schools.

"I didn't know the teachers and the principal there," said junior Michael Seymour, 16, who returned to Miami Edison Senior High from Archbishop Curley/Notre Dame High. "I had to learn a whole new system there, and I've already been through that process once at Edison."

Critics of vouchers, a cornerstone of the education policies implemented by Gov. Jeb Bush, said the returning students show that vouchers are misguided.

But a spokeswoman for Bush called the trend a triumph of school choice.

"No longer are these children trapped in failing schools," Katie Muniz said. "Now they have a choice -- and some prefer to stay in their home school. These were choices they never had before."

A 1999 state law allows students at public schools that earn a failing grade two years out of four to get a voucher to attend private school. Students in Escambia County that year became Florida's first to use vouchers. About 9,000 students at 10 schools in Escambia, Miami-Dade, Orange and Palm Beach counties became eligible this summer for the first time.

Having problems

Miami-Dade officials said they think many students who returned to failing public schools were having academic or behavior problems that weren't resolved in the private schools.

Urban education experts say another factor might be at play: culture shock. All five failing Miami-Dade schools, for example, are in low-income neighborhoods, and most voucher students may have had a hard time acclimating to a private-school setting.

"The culture and peer group of a private school are alien, and students feel that," said Joan Wynne, associate director of the Center for Urban Education and Innovation at Florida International University.