Dive Brief:

• The Florida Senate voted 29-11 to expand the state's voucher program, giving middle-income families the opportunity to apply for voucher funding.    
• The voucher program is only open to families making up to 185% of the federal poverty level, but starting in 2016, middle income families will be eligible as well.  
• The state's House is expected to pass the bill, as it recently passed a similar measure.

Dive Insight:

The program allows students use public funds to attend private schools, which means they are no longer subject to the high-stakes testing culture prominent in traditional public schools. Florida's emphasis on accountability has made this a point of contention, so the new bill includes a clause saying private schools with student bodies mainly comprised of voucher students must publish their standardized test scores. Florida Republicans said such a clause was necessary for the bill to pass, but that isn't really cutting it for many critics of the program outside of legislation. 

A scathing column in the Tampa Bay Times by John Ramano starts, "There are common hypocrites. There are spectacular hypocrites. And then there are Florida legislators." Ramano is furious with the disconnect between Common Core battles, accountability, and high-stakes testing legislators push for when public dollars are used in traditional public schools, given the seemingly blind eye they turn to private schools using public dollars by way of voucher students.  

As Ramano writes, "Lawmakers are obsessively fanatical about accountability in public schools, and yet disturbingly unconcerned about accountability in private schools."

The fact that the bill will now include middle-income families reads as incongruous to Ramano, given the fact that it was originally created to give poor students a choice in where they attend schools.