Reading the liberal newspapers in Florida on the topic of school choice can make your head spin.

They are gleeful over the fact that the state has snatched $38 million from the corporate income tax credit scholarship program and tossed it into the huge $11.5 billion pot of money for the public schools.

There, it will have no discernible effect. In the scholarship program, it could help poor children get an education.

That demonstrates rather starkly the priorities of choice opponents.

One of the papers also is fuming about the fact that the private schools don't administer the state's FCAT test, calling it "the only legitimate way under the state's system to compare schools and judge performance."

Really? Parents seem to be able to make comparisons quite well. Politicians and public schoolteachers often place their children in private schools, for example, making the decision without the "benefit" of an FCAT test.

That is because they know the school they choose is dedicated to educating children, rather than pumping up the paychecks of adults and fattening union warchests.

Surely, they also know that 95 percent of the private schools use a standardized test, the Stanford-9.

The FCAT is a measurement for the public schools, based on what public school educators say children in those schools should know. But private schools have their own ideas about curriculum. Forcing the FCAT on them would require them to bend their curriculum to match that of the public schools their students have fled.

By and large, children from the private schools don't require remedial reading and writing courses in college, and most graduate. What better indicator do parents need?

With choice, parents can move their child to another school if he is not learning. A child trapped in a failing public school by economic circumstances has no recourse -- except for the hope that school choice offers.

The corporate tax credit scholarship program in North Florida -- which has about 1,000 hopeful children on its waiting list -- is named, appropriately, HEROES.

This story can be found online at

http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/110203/opi_13931573.shtml