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Florida amendment defeat: media roundup

With the defeat of the Florida voucher amendment yesterday by a single vote, Florida media is hopping today.  Keep visiting this space for updates.

If you read enough Florida media articles about school choice, you start to see a pattern.  From the Tallahassee Democrat:

In a razor-thin vote that cost the majority leader his job, the Senate dealt a second major blow to Gov. Jeb Bush’s education legacy Monday – refusing to revive his tuition-voucher plan for students in failing public schools.

The Miami Herald:

In a stinging loss for Gov. Jeb Bush’s education legacy, the state Senate narrowly defeated a plan to ask voters to protect and expand his voucher program that sends public money to private schools.

The Orlando Sentinel:

In a stunning second blow to Gov. Jeb Bush, the Florida Senate on Monday night rejected a ballot proposal aimed at reviving the governor’s private-school voucher program for students at failing public schools.

Whose voucher program?  The governor’s.  There are, of course, all sorts of connotative meanings: it’s his pet project, he’s foisting it on an unsuspecting public, it’s his "scheme" (a favorite buzzword of anti-school-choice unionistas everywhere).  But such language conveniently sets aside images like these, from a school choice rally in Tallahassee in February:
 

There were also some interesting comments from Al Lawson, the sole Democrat to vote for the amendment.  From this report in the Tallahassee Democrat, which featured Lawson chewing out his fellow Dems in a caucus this morning:

Lawson said many of Florida’s worst schools are in heavily black areas, including inner-city schools and poor rural communities. He said wealthy and middle-class students can afford better schools, or their communities get more attention from school boards, but that vouchers would have helped mainly poor and black students.

"A lot of these schools in minority communities have been failing for years and years. They’re poorly equipped and y’all have them in y’all’s districts; you know, they don’t have the same level of teachers at those schools," Lawson said at a morning Democratic caucus. "The equipment in those schools is dilapidated. Some of those schools are falling down because the system has not put money into those schools – and you all know it."

Meanwhile, the amendment defeat has cost Alex Villalobos his job as majority leader.  Two separate stories on that in the St. Petersburg Times and the Tallahassee Democrat. 

UPDATE–Mark Pudlow, spokesman for the NEA-affiliated Florida Education Association, is being just a bit disingenuous:

The prospect of the FEA challenging other voucher programs, "is just a scare tactic," Pudlow said. But he acknowledged the union was still analyzing the impact of at least one voucher program, Florida’s corporate tax-credit program used by children in poor families.

Just who do you think you’re kidding? We can expect to see you and the ACLU in court in, what, June?