Tampa Bay Times: 

Not surprisingly, a bill aimed at increasing the cap for Florida's corporate tax credit scholarship program  passed its first Senate committee on Monday along partisan lines.

Sponsor Sen. Lizbeth Benacquisto, R-Fort Myers, cast the effort as one to provide better educational options to the state's most financially needy students. The program offers low-income students vouchers to private schools.

"The intent is to serve asbolutely the most needy children in our communities," Benacquisto said, criticizing those who labeled the program as vouchers.

She noted that the scholarships help those students while also leaving about 32 percent of the per-student funding behind for other school needs.

Sen. Bill Montford, D-Tallahassee, challenged her assumption that the money goes to the public schools. He took pains to point out that he found the scholarship program beneficial to many students. At the same time, though, he suggested some of the schools the students attend are not of high quality.

That may be true of public schools as well, he acknowledged. But the state's accountability program points that out and focuses improvement plans at those schools. The question, Montford suggested, is why not hold the private schools receiving state funding to the same standard?

"Would you consider requiring those schools to take the FCAT?" he asked. "If it's good for the public schools, why not these? ... What's wrong with holding those schools to a high level of accountability and a high level of transparency?"

Benacquisto pointed out that current state law does not allow the private schools to administer the FCAT. She suggested that a change to the law, if offered, might be welcomed. The bill next heads to the Senate budget committee. A similar House bill has been assigned to three House committees.

Tampa Bay Times:

The fastest growing public school district in Florida doesn't have football, school lunches or busing. It doesn't get a grade from the state, and it operates free of the rules and scrutiny that dog most public schools. * Students in this district conduct frog dissections without ever stepping in a science lab, take PE without ever going into a gym and learn how to drive without ever getting in a car. * They do all of it online.

In less than 15 years, Florida Virtual School has become the largest state-funded online K-12 school in the nation, an enterprise with a $166.3 million budget and close to 1,500 employees and 130,000 students. It offers more than 110 courses, from core subjects like algebra to electives such as Chinese and guitar.

Florida education leaders have turned to Florida Virtual as a solution to overcrowded classes, limited course offerings and budget cuts. It is the darling of politicians enamored of its price tag; Florida Virtual bills itself as a bargain, educating for $2,100 less per pupil than traditional schools.
And it makes millions. How many public schools can say that?

"I think we have already made a huge impact in Florida, and that's only going to continue to grow," says Florida Virtual board chairman Bob Muni.

But in a state that puts a premium on standardized testing, there is no clear, across-the-board measure to compare the performance of Florida Virtual students to those in brick-and-mortar schools.

Florida Center for Investigative Reporting:

When Rick Scott ran for governor, he vowed to cut state government, corporate income taxes and business regulations. As a result, he promised, Florida would become a corporate-friendly state that would attract new companies and new jobs.

"We're going to run this state like a business," he told supporters in Panama City in October 2010.

He won the election and cut state government, corporate taxes and business regulations. Now he's one of the most unpopular politicians in the country....

But Scott says his policies are working. As evidence, he cites a declining unemployment rate and rising job growth. "We were able to have a positive impact on Floridians in 2011," Scott wrote in a year-end announcement.

A Florida Center for Investigative Reporting examination of data reveals that the Scott administration's claims of success are premature, even inaccurate.

According to federal and state labor statistics, government and academic studies, economic forecasts, and interviews with economic analysts - information that has not been widely reported - FCIR has found:

• -There's no evidence Scott's policies are responsible for any of the new jobs in Florida over the past year.
• -The jobless rate is falling because so many Floridians have stopped looking for work that they aren't being counted anymore.
• -Steep cuts in state spending have further squeezed the poor and unemployed, and in turn, the municipalities in which they live.
• -The majority of new jobs are in the lowest-paying sectors.
• -Wages have fallen for the poorest workers.
• -Poverty has increased.
• -Florida has one of the highest populations of uninsured in the country.

Meanwhile, Scott has eliminated the corporate income tax for half the businesses that paid it, and is working on eliminating it for another quarter that still do. He has also rejected federal money to implement a new health care law he is opposed to, in both cases forgoing tens of millions of dollars....

Rick Scott, who has never held public office before, ran on the promise that he would create 700,000 jobs over seven years above what was forecast. After the election, he backed away from that claim, saying he really meant he would create a flat 700,000 jobs - all jobs state economists had already predicted would be created. And when challenged, Scott released a statement that didn't clarify things, saying he was committed to creating "700,000 jobs over seven years no matter what the economy might otherwise gain or lose." Scott is also taking credit for what he says is an improving job market in Florida. "We've had plenty of success so far," he told supporters recently, referring to a drop in unemployment....

The job growth that Scott says shows his policies are putting us on the right track were predicted by state economists in February 2011, a month after Scott took office, as Florida eased out of the recession. Specifically, the Office of Economic and Demographic Research, which tracks and forecasts economic trends for the state legislature, predicted that Florida's economy would grow by 129,000 non-farm jobs  (including the public sector) in the 2010-2011 fiscal year.   

"The bottom line is that job growth was expected to rebound significantly after the recession and its aftermath, independent of any governor's actions," says Alan Stonecipher, an analyst at the Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy, a think tank in Tallahassee that has been consistently critical of Scott's agenda. "There's no evidence his policies are creating jobs...."

"(Scott) believes that unfettered corporate activity will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs for the state. And he seems to think everyone will benefit from this even if budget cuts curtail services and hurt education," the Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy's Stonecipher says. "What those things end up doing is put more money in the pockets of corporations. It's not the taxes or regulations that are strangling businesses and jobs. It's that there's not enough demand in the economy for producing goods and services...."

The Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy and others advocate revenue-generating approaches including removing some, if not all, of the 250 items exempt from Florida's sales tax; requiring the collection of sales tax for Internet purchases; and reimposing corporate income taxes