Gov. Bush is wrong about school vouchers
Former Gov.Jeb Bush defended Florida’s school voucher expansion in his May 18 column (“Families deserve school choice. Reject union lawsuit”). Choice can be valuable. But when taxpayer dollars are involved, accountability and fairness should matter just as much as choice itself.
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Florida ranks between 41st and 50th nationally in school quality assessments. Our teachers rank between 47th and 50th in pay, earning an average salary of $54,875, more than $17,000 below the national average. The financial structure of the voucher system also deserves closer scrutiny.
Meanwhile, private schools accepting taxpayer-funded vouchers are not required to employ certified teachers, follow state curriculum standards, or meet the same accountability measures required of public schools and use selective admissions policies that public schools cannot.
Orange County Public Schools are currently educating 1,747 students without corresponding state funding after families chose to return those students to public schools from voucher-supported programs.
Every school receiving taxpayer funding, whether public, private, charter or homeschool-related, should meet reasonable accountability standards, including academic testing and transparent reporting to ensure students are receiving a quality education.
School choice should not come at the expense of the public education system that serves most Florida children.
Florida’s priority should be simple: strengthen public schools, support teachers, require equal accountability for all schools receiving taxpayer funds, and ensure every child — regardless of ZIP code or family income — has access to a strong education.
Our children deserve opportunity, accountability, and fairness. Taxpayers deserve the same.
— Rod Olsen, Apopka
Measure AI against our morals
Booing at a commencement speech has become a cause celebre. I don’t agree with the Sunday letter-writer that everyone who booed the UCF speaker touting the future of AI was afraid. Humans have an innate sense of morality. Something artificial does not have a moral backdrop to its decisions. We see it constantly in decisions by organizations of all kinds, from banks to government agencies to HOAs. AI will only increase the number of those decisions and our confusion about who is actually responsible. All AI decisions must be measured against human morality.
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— Roger Van Zanen, Deltona
Anti-surrogacy argument goes too far
Kimberly Bird’s column opposing surrogacy (“Uthmeier is right to protect unborn from surrogacy,” May 17) exposes the slippery slope behind her specific fetal-personhood argument.
She writes that Florida children, “born or preborn,” should never be “bartered between adults.” However, if that principle is applied consistently, it does not stop with surrogacy.
Florida already permits adoptions each year in which adults, courts, agencies and attorneys make legally binding decisions about parental rights and the transfer of custody. In Florida, children under 12 are unable to consent to those arrangements, yet we accept them because adoption is viewed as serving the child’s best interests.
That distinction matters. Adoption addresses existing children in need of families, while surrogacy creates planned parental arrangements before birth. The former occurs in the thousands, the latter is rare by comparison.
Reasonable people can debate the ethics of commercial surrogacy. But Bird’s argument goes much further than that. By framing any adult-directed transfer of parental rights as morally akin to “bartering,” she advances a principle broad enough to threaten areas of family law far beyond surrogacy itself.
To be clear, children are not property. But family law necessarily involves adults and courts making decisions about parental rights, custody, adoption, guardianship, and reproductive arrangements. Pretending surrogacy exists in some uniquely separate moral category oversimplifies a much more complicated legal and ethical reality, and underscores how closely the argument is tied to broader fetal-personhood efforts aimed at abortion law.
— Dale Leatherwood, Lake Mary
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